Precarious Woods (a.k.a. Dretzel & Marcel)

Background

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General story

In 2017, I launched the comic strip Precarious Woods a.k.a. Dretzel & Marcel online, and made about 70+ strips within the following year, which I then collected into two paperback books.

 

The strip did have yet a different title during these early years, a title which I later came to think was weak. Thus, in the early 2020s, I republished the strip as Dretzel & Marcel, and had the two paperback books relaunched as such. Yet later, I landed on the title of Precarious Woods for the comic. See the shop section for more info on the books etc.

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(If anyone's curious; the name Dretzel is "borrowed" from an 18th-century German composer named Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel, whose work I doubt I've ever heard, I was just looking for some obscure name, that's all. Marcel just happens to be a name I like, and I think it fits the character well.)

 

Examples below. Many more included in the aforementioned books (and the strips do, of course, enjoy better resolution there than I decided to give them here). The "look" of the strip has changed over the years; I started out pretty old-school, using pen nibs dipped in bottles of ink, then switched to digital. More recently, I sort of "rediscovered" analog drawing, suddenly relying partly on felt-tip pens and coloring pencils again...

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Beyond independent publishing...

Just to quickly note, Prekære skoger (Norwegian title) was published in some Norwegian papers (Aftenposten etc) for 3 days in the summer of '26, as a "guest comic," also in an issue of Norwegian comics magazine Pondus (#05/26), as it made it to a semi-finalist spot in a Norwegian comic strip competition (the strips had been specifically written/drawn for the competition, never published before, and were therefore eligible to participate). Obviously mostly interesting to Norwegian readers, if anything, but anyhow...

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Below, a couple of strips that made it to some Norwegian papers.

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