K.J. Kolka has announced that The Cardinal has now gone online, as of Nov. 15, 2007. The red clad hero is appearing weekly at the secular Web site, ComicsSherpa.com, a sister page of GoComics.com, which carries over 100 professional comics. A new Cardinal strip appears on site every Sunday. Readers can also receive The Cardinal via e-mail through a FREE subscription service, available on the Web page.

"This is Cardinal 3.0," explained K.J. Kolka, creator of the comic. "We're starting the whole series over but with some changes. The potential for many new readers on the Internet is phenonmenal and we felt it was best to start over.

"Old fans won't be disappointed though. The series starts off with a new story and introduces some new regular characters. After that it will be a mixture of new stories and re-envisioned old stories. I'm redoing old stories with new scenes, enhancing old scenes and even adding new characters. They may even have different endings."

Kolka said a new vision for The Cardinal series began to develop a few years ago, around 2004, when a group of Christian comics creators gathered for a "SALT Summit" to discuss the future of Christian comics. By then, the idea of online comics was already being considered and Kolka wanted to create a second Cardinal series aimed toward teens. Somehow, the ideas eventually merged.

Over the next few years, printing prices and distribution costs rose while funding for his free printed publication dwindled. Seeing Web sites the way of the future, he began researching what was popular in comics and culture, checked out comics Web sites, spent time around non-Christians, and sought advice from a comics professionals on how to improve The Cardinal.

"I really felt God was calling me to do The Cardinal 3.0 for non-Christians in the end. That meant changing my perspective on how to write it and creating a bunch of new characters. It also meant finding a secular Web site."

In the new series, Arbor City is greatly developed as an entity, a place of divergent cultures and faiths. Readers will meet the mayor, the newspaper editor, police, various citizens and homeless people, all of whom have their own opinions about the city's birdman. College student Rich Benton (the Cardinal) will spend much of his time volunteering at the local mission, which is the major setting of the new series. By night he'll protect the inhabitants of that slum area as the Cardinal, an idealistic Christian super hero in a postmodern world.

"I think both old and new readers will enjoy the new series," said Kolka. "The Cardinal will be highly recognizable to former readers. He'll just be more fleshed out as a character -- as are all the characters from the former series. To me, it's just a step up and I'm excited about where it's going."

The new series can be read online at:
http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csfjg