PanelWave Launches Open JSON Format for Interactive Graphic Novels

Munich, 6 October 2026. PanelWave today launched the PanelWave format, an open JSON specification for interactive graphic novels, as a public standard. The format is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which allows anyone to implement readers, authoring tools and converters for it, with attribution. It is the foundation of the PanelWave ecosystem and is designed to do for interactive graphic novels what EPUB did for the e-book: give creators, publishers and tool makers one portable, documented description of a work that no single platform owns.

A PanelWave work is a single JSON manifest. Its chapters are directed graphs: panels are nodes, and edges say which panel may follow which, under what condition and with what visual transition. A conventional comic is a chain of edges; a choice is two edges with different conditions. Panels are composed of layered images, video, text and sound, carry comic-style speech balloons and clickable hotspots, and every reader-facing string is stored per language with a defined fallback chain.

What version 1.7 covers

The format launches at version 1.7 after seven backward-compatible minor releases during 2026. Every valid 1.0 manifest remains valid today.

• Story structure: chapters, pages with placements and reading order, panels with layers, speech balloons, hotspots, audio and video tracks, and per-format views for mobile, desktop, print and video output.
• Branching and state: graph edges with JSON Logic conditions and priorities, typed variables in five scopes, hotspot actions and mutations, and panel variants that swap content by reader state.
• Video panels (1.1) with play and start modes, loops and poster frames; style presets (1.3) for reusable lettering and balloon styles; the infinite canvas (1.4), which places a chapter's panels on one continuous plane with authored camera moves; asset folders and translation state (1.5) so a complete work can travel between authoring systems; product catalogues, layer animations and alternative covers (1.6); and labelled choices, hotspots shown as buttons and chapters that simply follow their panel order (1.7).
• Localization, accessibility and monetization: BCP-47 locales with fallback chains, per-locale asset variants, alt text, captions and transcripts, content warnings, and declarative paywall rules that leave payment processing to the publisher.
• Extensibility: namespaced custom fields and a sandboxed plugin model, so third parties can extend manifests without breaking any reader.

Tooling and documentation

The specification ships as a JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) with a command-line tool, @panelwave/cli, that validates, bundles, diffs and upgrades manifests, and a TypeScript package, @panelwave/types, generated from the schema. The MIT-licensed reference player renders any valid manifest and is published on npm tomorrow, 7 October. The full format reference, concept guides and example manifests are at docs.panelwave.org.

"Digital comics never got their EPUB moment," said Jens Hoppe, founder of PanelWave. "Every platform invented its own container, and every creator who signed up got locked in. We are publishing the format first, before the business around it, because the order matters: the standard has to be something you can adopt without adopting us."

Governance and next steps

The format follows semantic versioning. Minor versions are additive, deprecated fields remain for at least one major version, and changes are proposed through a public request-for-comments process. PanelWave presents the format, the player and its authoring platform at the Frankfurter Buchmesse from 7 to 11 October at the XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria booth in Hall 5.0, including a talk on the format on Friday, 9 October at 13:00.

The schema, licence and tooling are linked from panelwave.org/format.