Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Omnibus 1

Omnibus 1

Publication date	September 1, 2021
Pages	952
ISBN	978-0-9836022-9-3

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Omnibus 1 is a 952-page paperback with a publication date of September 1, 2021, collecting the first three volumes of the comic in completely remade form. It contains Chapters 1 through 69 plus nine intermissions, the same ground originally covered by Volume One, Starting Over and Volume Three. The whole run was redrawn, rewritten and recolored between 2017 and 2021, and the book supersedes those three hardcovers as the canonical print layout of the comic’s first six years. It was funded by a 2020 Kickstarter campaign that raised over $70,000.

Back cover blurb

Bittersweet Candy Bowl is a comic about high schoolers coping with big problems. Buried feelings, difficult friendships, and those terrible moments where you think you’ve lost it all. It’s a story about a lovably infuriating bunch of kids growing up.

• Mike, the sweet-natured romantic who last saw his girlfriend in grade school…
• Lucy, the brash but sensitive loner who’s more of an open book than she thinks she is…
• Paulo, the mischievous slacker who’s less of a womanizing jerk than he lets on…
• …and Daisy, the cheerful bookworm desperate to be more than everybody’s “little sister”..

Contents

The back cover of Omnibus.

The book opens quietly. A single colophon page credits Veronica Vera for story and art, Oliver Bareham for co-writing and editing, Samira Iravani for the cover design and Eric C. Wilder for the interior, along with four art assistants. There is no dedication, cast page or introduction before the comic begins.

The table of contents spreads across three pages, with chapter titles grouped in rounded pastel panels and single-color spot illustrations of birds, petals and cats tucked between them. The listings run from printed page 7 to page 942.

Nearly everything after that is the comic itself. Each chapter opens on the same warm design of brown serif type and a row of colored dots, with the intermissions slotted in among the numbered chapters. The final intermission is Adult Supervision. A one-page author bio follows before the back cover.

Table of contents

Chapter	Title
1	Simple Pleasures
2	Gaming Rivalry
3	Merry Snow Day
4	Unfit for Education
5	The Burden of Parenthood
6	Flying Lessons
7	Prom Preparation
8	Helping Hands
9	Show and Tell
10	Gone Fishing
11	Pep Rally
12	Off to the Movies
Intermission	Catty Remarks
13	Puppy Love
14	Confrontation
15	Aftermath
16	Field Day
17	Unfulfilled Fantasy
18	Farewell, Middle School
Intermission	Mike’s Birthday
19	Blurry Memories
Intermission	Yashy’s Birthday
20	Hot Pursuit
21	Enter High School
22	A Difficult Choice
23	A New Leaf
24	Wardrobe Malfunction
Intermission	Daisy’s Birthday
25	Humble Approach
26	Left Behind
27	Flirting with Disaster
Intermission	Lucy’s Birthday
28	Feline Festivities
29	Midterm Time
Intermission	Tread Carefully
30	Troubled Waters
31	Carry On
32	Follow Me
33	Onwards to Adventure
34	Bonding
35	Under Pressure
36	Crash and Burn
Intermission	Out of the Frame
37	A Different Side
Intermission	Birthday Double-Team
38	Rising Temperature
39	Love My Way
40	Moving On
41	Invitation
42	Arrival
43	Search and Rescue
44	Intervention
45	Return
46	New Beginnings
47	Pick Me Up
48	Turning Tides
49	Wonderland
50	A Distance Apart
51	Unrequited
52	Another Shoulder
53	Casting Call
54	Back and Forth
55	To the Top
56	Up to Bat
57	Mischief Night
58	Mother’s Day
59	Rehearsal
60	Feline Filibuster
61	Pillow Talk
62	Call Waiting
63	On the Sidelines
64	Carry Me
65	Dinner Time
66	On Our Own
67	Fade Away
68	December
69	At Loose Ends
Intermission	Adult Supervision

Obsolete chapters

It’s the omnibus that made the older books obsolete in the first place. The site’s archive now files the original three volumes under the heading “Obsolete Volumes” and offers them as free eBook downloads. The remake was not a light touch-up, either. By the authors’ count it rewrote 74,935 words of dialogue and recolored 855 pages, adding dozens of new sequences along the way. Another 4,769 panels were redrawn from Volume One’s notebook-paper originals.

Veronica has said she edited out “a lot of the really egregious sexual assault” that the old material had played as gags. Smaller jokes went with it, like the running gag giving Mike the surname “Scott”, which she erased “because it was being taken seriously”.

On the Sidelines and Adult Supervision, once exclusive to the Volume Three print book, appear in the omnibus sequence alongside the other chapters and intermissions. Bittersweet Club International members can flip between the old and redrawn versions of a page with the archive’s “Compare Pages” feature.

Bonus sections

By the standards of the numbered volumes, Omnibus 1 travels light. Its outline lists no concept art gallery, guest comics or “In the Next Volume” teaser. The authors also promised “no complex chapter guides, no excuses for upscaled scans, no story summaries or skip-this-section recommendations”.

The one traditional extra is About the Author, a single illustrated page at the very back. Its four paragraphs follow Veronica from childhood comics through art studies in Sydney to full-time comics work in New York City with Oliver. It ends on “She is allergic to cats but has one anyway.” The eBook edition adds one page of its own, a friendly anti-piracy notice signed by Veronica and Oliver and illustrated with a pirate-costumed dog and a facepalming cat.

Kickstarter campaign

The book was funded by “The Bittersweet Candy Bowl Omnibus”, which ran from November 23, 2020 to January 2, 2021. It raised $70,303 from 754 backers against a $40,000 goal. The campaign launched the same day the remade pages began rolling out on Webtoon, with the printed book pitched as the way to read the new pages first. It wasn’t shy about the stakes either, calling the book “the definitive BCB” and “no ordinary compendium of old material — it’s the new canon”.

Reward tiers ran from a $49 first-run copy up to a $700 original pen-and-paper commission. A $200 “Adopt-a-Chapter” tier sat in between, letting backers claim a Volume One chapter as their very own. The most popular tier by far was the $79 Deluxe Edition, taken by 344 of the 754 backers. It bundled custom sketches, original pencil art, an acrylic charm in the omnibus style and the “Scrapped Book”, an eBook collecting all the replaced material with commentary. Add-ons included a bag of plushies and a copy of the original Volume One “to play spot-the-difference with”.

Backers unlocked stretch goals for new author commentary on every page, a deluxe cover varnish, a fan-voted Ships Ahoy season and two commemorative stickers for the limited edition ($65 and up) books. Separately, the site’s May 2021 overhaul included updated author commentary for the entire comic archive.

Availability

Sale through the BCB store was deliberately staged after backer fulfillment. Oliver said in July 2021 that getting books to backers came first, and that store orders would open a couple of months later. An eBook conversion of the first edition also exists. The 2024 Volume Seven Kickstarter offered the omnibus as a pairing for the new volume.

On April 29, 2026, Veronica said the store was closed “for the foreseeable future”. She pointed fans toward future Kickstarter campaigns, such as a possible Omnibus 2 or Volume 8, as a way to pick up a copy.