Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Starting Over
 | This page is pretty raw LLM output. |
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Publication date | December 24, 2012 |
|---|---|
| Pages | 276 |
| ISBN | 978-0-9836022-1-7 |
| Preceded by | Volume One |
| Followed by | Volume Three |
Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Starting Over is the second hardcover collection of Bittersweet Candy Bowl, a 276-page volume released on December 24, 2012. It collects chapters 48 through 60, picking up where Volume One left off with Pick Me Up and running through Mischief Night. The book was designed as a jumping-in point for brand new readers, and it opens with a lengthy recap comic of the story so far. It was funded through a Kickstarter campaign shared with the companion book Ask Roseville High, and like the other early volumes, its content has since been superseded by the rewritten and redrawn canon.
Back cover blurb
What’s a guy to do when he’s surrounded by girls he can’t understand? What’s a girl to do when a long-overdue confession loses her everything? Paulo and Lucy try to find the answers in this second collection of the online comic.
Featuring over 60 pages of new material, including a comprehensive summary of the story so far, “Starting Over” is the perfect starting point for new readers.
Contents
The book opens with its smallprint page, which in the eBook edition is an illustrated plea to share the file with friends rather than post it online, complete with a handwritten-style sign-off from Veronica and Oliver. The colophon credits story and art to Veronica Vera, with editing, design and additional writing by Oliver Bareham, and slips in the disclaimer that “Similarities to talking cats living or dead are highly improbable.”
Loose black-and-white sketch busts frame the single-page table of contents, with the top three drawn upside-down, for whatever reason. New readers then get “Story Summary: Starting Over”, a recap comic in blue duotone that fills printed pages 4 through 37. The Kickstarter billed it as a 32-page prologue “making it the perfect place to start reading”,[1] and the back cover folds it into “over 60 pages of new material”. The main story doesn’t begin until page 38. Its chapters run straight through, with the two intermissions Turning Tides and “Sensible Precautions” tucked between Casting Call and Back and Forth. At the back are a “BONUS STUFF” section and an “In the Next Volume” teaser.
Table of contents
| Chapter | Title |
|---|---|
| Story Summary | Starting Over |
| 48 | Pick Me Up |
| 49 | In the End |
| 50 | Wonderland |
| 51 | A Distance Apart |
| 52 | Unrequited |
| 53 | Another Shoulder |
| 54 | Casting Call |
| Intermission | Turning Tides |
| Intermission | Sensible Precautions |
| 55 | Back and Forth |
| 56 | Molly’s Adventure |
| 57 | Up to Bat |
| 58 | To the Top |
| 59 | Another Path |
| 60 | Mischief Night |
| Maze | |
| Fortune Teller | |
| Bonus | Mother’s Day |
| In the Next Volume |
Obsolete chapters
Starting Over is one of the three volumes the site now lists as obsolete. Its chapters were substantially rewritten and redrawn between 2017 and 2021, and the canonical versions live in the website’s remastered archive.[2] The Mother’s Day bonus comic stayed a book exclusive until it joined the web archive in 2018.[3]
The book’s run as the recommended starting point wound down well before the redraws. For a while the site’s archive was even restructured to start new readers at Volume Two, an experiment that was later reverted.[4] Oliver still recommended going back for Volume One anyway, since “there is some substantial stuff ‘starting over’ leaves out”,[5] and Veronica noted that the volume skips a lot of Lucy’s nicer moments, so “she starts off as incredibly abrasive from the get-go”.[6] By 2016 Oliver was playing the pitch down altogether, leaving the book “as just a nice little recap to encounter as you read through”.[6]
Bonus sections
The Maze is a full-page pen-and-paper puzzle asking “Can you help Mike avoid the obstacles and deliver his roses to Sandy?”, with chibi versions of the cast as the hazards. The Fortune Teller is a cut-out-and-fold cootie catcher promising to determine your chosen character’s One True Pairing, “no chapters-long deliberation required”. Its flaps offer Paulo, Mike, Sandy, Rachel, Daisy and Lucy. In print it sits back-to-back with a page reading “(This is funnier if you’ve just cut out the Fortune Teller which normally appears behind this page.)”, so the hardcover really does expect you to take scissors to it.
Mother’s Day is a twelve-page prequel comic in a rough, sketchy pink duotone, showing how a young Paulo and David first met at Roseville Elementary. The last page, In the Next Volume, teases Volume Three in diagonal wedge panels (“New rivalries!”, “Pillow fights!”). One wedge appears in full color for the “Now in COLOR!” punchline after pages of monochrome and duotone comics.
Kickstarter campaign
The “Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Starting Over” Kickstarter ran from August 23 to September 21, 2012. Its 355 backers funded this book and Ask Roseville High (“High school, heartbreak, and cats. In two new full-color books!”).[1] Against a goal of USD 14,000, they pledged USD 35,495.23, with PayPal pledges nudging the real total a fair bit higher still.[1] Real cats were recruited for the campaign video through open “cat auditions” (“Your cat could be famous!”).[1][7]
Every backer received a Kickstarter-exclusive Jessica charm, and the most popular reward was the tier bundling both new books, taken by 95 backers.[1] The top reward, claimed by exactly one backer, was the original cover art, signed and framed in the glass of the retired photo scanner that “saw BCB through its first 900 pages”.[1] Two stretch goals cleared before the deadline, adding character prints of the main four to every book order along with a new batch of BCB candy.[8][9]
Availability
Physical copies took a little longer than the December 2012 edition date suggests. Printer delays pushed delivery back,[10] but by March 22, 2013, the hardcovers were in stock and preorder shipments were underway.[11] An eBook edition was sold alongside the hardcover in PDF, CBZ and Kindle formats,[1] and as of the 2017 Volume Five campaign the book was still physically in stock, while Volume One had gone eBook-only.[12]
Since the site’s 2021 archive overhaul, the whole book has been available as a free eBook download in the archive’s obsolete volumes section.[2][13] The BCB store itself is closed for the foreseeable future as of April 2026, with Veronica citing the couple’s move to Australia.[14]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Starting Over”. Kickstarter. 2012-08-23.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 “BCB Archive”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
- ↑ “Tumblr post announcing the chapter’s addition to the web archive”. Tumblr. 2018-08-16.
- ↑ Oliver (2015-04-03). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
- ↑ Oliver (2015-05-03). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Veronica and Oliver (2016-07-14). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
- ↑ “BCB newspost: “Your cat could be famous!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2012-07-30.
- ↑ “BCB newspost: “Kickstarter stretchgoal: character prints!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2012-09-12.
- ↑ “BCB newspost: “BCB VOL. 2 KICKSTARTER PROJECT: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2012-09-20.
- ↑ “BCB newspost: “Book update & bathtime for Lucy””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2013-02-06.
- ↑ “BCB newspost: “New books now in stock and on sale!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2013-03-22.
- ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Five”. Kickstarter. 2017-02-06.
- ↑ “BCB newspost: “Archive transition, a new “Compare Pages” BCI member-only feature, and the lates””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2021-05-24.
- ↑ Veronica (2026-04-29). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.