I started such a tool recently. It is probably not suckless, as it is already 1600 loc, but can properly display a man page, colour escape codes and content from UTF-8-test.txt and UTF8-demo.txt without ncurses.
http://github.com/josuah/iode If this one sucks, I would be glad to see the implementation, as I will learn a lot from it. I have also seen rirc (irc client) that does not use ncurses for its interface. http://github.com/rcr/rirc/blob/master/draw.c
