A new webcomic starts today: Tommie Kelly’s The Holy Numbers! It’s about a guy who wakes up with a vision of enlightenment and sets out to change the world. Is he a guru or a fraud? What happens when a movement overtakes its founder? The comic launches with six episodes in one go, and will update Monday to Friday from now on. You’ll want to follow this one. (If you’re at work or have a problem with that sort of thing, there’s some nudity and bad language.)

I forgot to mention, but last week’s page of The Cattle Raid of Cooley was the final page of chapter 6, and you may have noticed that production of pages has slowed to a trickle lately. I’ve been at this since August 2008, over three and a half years, and I think I need a wee bit of a rest. So I’m going to take a few weeks off to do something different, recharge my batteries, and then come back and plunge into chapter seven with renewed vigour. I hope you’ll indulge me.

In the meantime, may I suggest you subscribe to the rss feed, the easiest way to follow webcomics, particularly serial ones, and most particularly serial ones with slightly unreliable update schedules? Here’s a link to an article I wrote for Irish Comic News on how to follow webcomics using rss feeds via Google Reader. If you’re interested in webcomics and don’t know about this, you will thank me.

Michael Cavna at the Washington Post is looking for nominations for the best webcomics of 2011. Please feel free to let him know about my award-winning efforts, and any others you feel deserve it, naturally. My own favourites of 2011 include:

• Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant - 19th century adventure serial by Tony Cliff
• Faraday the Blob - surreal humour by Alan Ryan
• Jesus and Mo - anonymous religious satire
• Girls With Slingshots - Danielle Corsetto’s sitcom strip
• Savage Chickens - observational and pop culture humour with chickens on post-it notes by Dan Savage
• Freakangels - Warren Ellis’s recently concluded post-apocalyptic serial

Warren Ellis, renowned comic writer and internet demi-deity, is running a series of three-panel comic strips by guest artists on his blog under the title “Three Panels Open”. PJ Holden‘s already done one, as have a load of other excellent artists – and now I have as well! Click to read my effort…

Over on Irish Comic News, I’ve done a tutorial for beginners on how to follow webcomics using the RSS feed. It’s something I’ve been doing for ages and kind of take for granted, but it’s easy to forget a lot of people don’t know these things. So if you’re one of those who tries to follow The Cattle Raid of Cooley by bookmarking it and trying to remember to look it up every Wednesday, give it a read. It will change your life.

A word from that shameless huckster Tommie Kelly…

“Looks like things over at Road Crew are speeding up. Not only has Tommie Kelly got his new Book collection NOTHING’S SHOCKING up for Pre-order from today but you can also pre-order Issue Two of the New Bi-monthly Road Crew comic FOR SALE! The Pre-orders are open for one week only and in this time you can a host of free bonus’s including Ecomics, Music downloads, free miniposters and all books/comics come signed. Not One to be missed, especially as the VERY SPECIAL EDITION of Nothing’s Shocking will only be available in this one week window. It contains ten extra pages, a variant cover and a nice big inked sketch from the author. You can get more details at http://www.roadcrewcomic.com.”

Tommie’s an ex-roadie (and a bit of a muso) himself, so he knows as well as anyone what life’s like behind the scenes of the rock business, and has the talent to turn it into comics. So go buy some comics off him, you know you want to.

Simon, the artist on Muddled, left me a comment asking to be added to my list of Irish webcomics. Just going through the archives and this one made me laugh.

Great Star Trek parody on Space Avalanche this week. Click through to read the whole thing…

Most of us call ‘em webcomics. Andy calls it a “stripblog”. Whatever, he’s serialising his comic Don’t Get Lost weekly. He describes it as “a tale of abuse and survival through the self and friendship”, so stick that in your rss reader.

Andy’s comics tend to be very personal, with very little by way of artifice to get between his head and the reader – they can be quite hard work, and it’s true his drawing is somewhat crude, but for unmediated honesty you’ll not find anybody quite like him. You might also like to try his 24 hour comic, Gran, which he created not long after his grandmother passed on.

Andy Luke’s second column at Alltern8 is up, in which he recommends some (mostly) small press comics as Christmas presents – including my own Ness.  Another he recommends is One Word for Everything, a collection of strips from Deirdre Ruane’s webcomic Wasted Epiphanies, which came as a pleasant surprise to me as I didn’t know she was putting her comics online.  A lot odd observations on mundane things from ususual perspectives (like the example below), and a few recurring characters, like Tempin’ Bear, a polar bear who, since his ice floe melted, has had to seek alternative employment in various unsuitable office jobs, all done in a free-and-easy drawing style. Great stuff, stick it in your RSS reader today!