Bittersweet Club International

The BCI membership card, as shown on the club signup page.

Bittersweet Club International (usually just BCI) is the paid annual membership club for Bittersweet Candy Bowl, billed as “the exclusive club for Bittersweet Candy Bowl’s best supporters.” The authors launched BCI in January 2011 as a donation-with-rewards program. The main draw nowadays is the Members’ Library, a collection of member-exclusive side comics. As of July 2026, the Library contained 61 chapters and over 880 pages. Making the comic is a full-time job for Veronica and Oliver, and the club page presents membership as plain patronage, with sign-ups directly supporting the comic’s publication.

Membership benefits

As of the July 2026 club page, there are two ways to join. A membership bought directly from the club is a one-time yearly payment (nothing recurring), with login details emailed right after purchase. Since late 2025, the “Valedictorian & BCI Member” monthly tier of Bittersweet Candy Bowl on Patreon has offered full access to the members’ library as well.

Membership includes:

• Full access to the Members’ Library, which the page says is “like getting three years of comic updates in advance!”
• The “Compare old and new pages” feature on Bittersweetcandybowl.com, which lets members toggle between the original and updated versions of the most heavily revised Omnibus chapters, up to chapter 45.
• A reserved comment name on Candybooru, marked with a gold BCI symbol.

Members’ Library

A clipping from Blind Date.

The Library dates to 2011, and its oldest chapter, Another Chance, was posted that March. The authors typically add three or four chapters a year and publish an upcoming-chapter schedule right on the club page. Its chapters include side stories and what the authors call “alternate paths” through the main comic. They range from short vignettes to the 90-page Fork in the Road 2. The authors described it as “so long that we had to upgrade the entire viewing system to handle it. (There’s a comments section now!)”

The club also gives away three complete chapters as free samples, so anyone can read Blind Date (11 pages), Grave Concern (21 pages) and Everyday Life (25 pages) without a membership. The full catalogue lives at List of Bittersweet Club International chapters.

History

Physical club era (2011–2020)

The “Exclusive gifts” section of the club page during the physical-gifts era, shared by Oliver in 2018.

The club was announced on January 15, 2011 as “THE PREMIER BCB EXPERIENCE” and “the hippest club for cool cats the world over.” The first exclusive gift was a Zombie Kimono Jasmine keychain, a nod to her costume in Back and Forth. The keychain was redesigned later on, so members received the Zombie Kimono version first and one of Jasmine holding a whale after that. Early sign-ups could also buy a “Founding Member” upgrade, which came with a numbered card and a small colored commission. That upgrade was supposed to be limited to the first ten members, but after “insane demand”, the authors raised the cap to 25. The club had 88 members within three weeks.

Membership in those days came with actual mail. The club sent out gifts and a membership card, and the pitch compared the whole arrangement to “an NPR tote bag—something fun and useful in return for your largesse.” Early members also got free postage from the store and ad-free browsing of the site, though both perks were eventually retired. By April 2012, the authors had replaced the original early-access perk with the exclusive comic library, then over one hundred pages. Oliver later revealed that the gifts followed “a 3 or 4 year schedule” planned in advance, with only the first revealed on the site. The second, for the record, was a brass lapel pin with the club’s ribbon-and-bow logo.

Electronic era (2020–present)

In May 2020, BCI became fully electronic and the mailed gifts ended. The following year, the authors added the members-only page-compare toggle during the site’s Omnibus archive overhaul. They also moved some chapters out of the public archive and into the Graveyard or BCI.

The Fork in the Road softcover, which paired a redrawn original with its sequel. It went out as a welcome gift to anyone who joined or renewed in November 2025.

In November 2025, the authors announced Fork in the Road 2 as a print-first release in a limited-edition 126-page softcover, offered as a welcome gift to new and renewing members through November 24. On December 31, they added the comic to the Library together with a complete redraw of the original Fork in the Road.

As of May 17, 2026, the authors had closed the BCB store pending their international move. BCI remained active, though. On July 25, 2026, the authors updated the BCI page and added the 29-page Relative Strangers to the Library.

Trivia

• The membership card was originally the “Bittersweet Gold Card,” pitched with mock-luxury copy claiming it “sways business associates, and waives speeding fines.” By June 2017 it had been renamed the “BCI card.”
• BCI comics were removed from version 2.0 of the Bittersweet Candy Bowl iPhone app at Apple’s request.
• BCB’s Kickstarter campaigns have generally offered backers the chance to commission a new idea for a member-only chapter. The 2013 Volume Three campaign, for example.
• The authors offered leftover gift packs from the physical era in the 2026 20th-anniversary sale: “You remember our Bittersweet Club International once sent gifts? Well, buy them all!”