Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Five

Volume Five

Publication date	August 3, 2017
Pages	260
ISBN	978-0-9836022-6-2
Preceded by	Volume Four
Followed by	Volume Six

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Five is the fifth print collection of Bittersweet Candy Bowl, a 260-page hardcover released in August 2017. It collects Chapters 81 through 88, from Take Heart to Class of 2008, covering the end of the gang’s sophomore year, and it comes with fifteen pages of comics that appear nowhere else. The book was funded by a 2017 Kickstarter campaign that more than doubled its goal. It follows Volume Four and precedes Volume Six.

Back cover blurb

The end of sophomore year: a time for first jobs, first cars, and first breakups. A hopeful prom night ends in disaster, Paulo’s clumsy fix for a friend’s relationship nearly backfires, and Augustus struggles to break a bad habit. Featuring fifteen pages of new comics, this fifth volume of the online comic goes out with a bang.

Contents

The back cover of Volume Five.

The front cover shows three of the cast posed in a forest beneath the series’ bubbly logo, with watercolor artwork by Veronica Vera. Inside, the smallprint page pairs the credits and copyright with a little illustration of a dog balancing an open book on its head, plus a fiction disclaimer that reads “Imagine: cats and dogs that can speak. You must, because they cannot.”

“Meet the Cast” takes up pages 4 and 5, giving twelve characters a square portrait, a name and a short status blurb apiece to catch readers up on where the story stands. Mike’s, for instance, reads “Guilt-ridden over Lucy’s sudden disappearance”, which suits a book Veronica and Oliver billed as “all about what the gang does once Lucy’s out of the picture”.

The comics fill the rest of the book. The eight numbered chapters first ran online between January 2014 and May 2015, and here they come interleaved with four short intermissions and the three book-exclusive bonus chapters. The final printed page is “In the Next Volume”, a teaser of seven diagonal preview vignettes for Volume Six with caption balloons like “Meet your girlfriend?!” and “Unresolved tension..”.

Table of contents

Chapter	Title
	Meet the Cast
81	Take Heart
Intermission	Love Note
82	Local Area
Bonus	Fashion Disaster
83	Small Fry
Intermission	Test Drive
84	Scenic Route
85	Total Recall
Bonus	There’s a Chance
Intermission	Textual Harassment
86	Trapped
87	Boy Toy
Intermission	Casual Outing
88	Class of 2008
Bonus	Afterglow

Obsolete chapters

The List of obsolete chapters has no entries from Volume Five. The rewrites that affected Volume One through Volume Three did not extend to this book, so its web chapters remain current. The book-only material is canon too. Asked whether bonus chapters like Afterglow count, Veronica answered “Yes!”, and Oliver called them “canon comics”.

Bonus sections

The fifteen new pages were, per the campaign, “the most pages of bonus comics we’ve put in a book yet”, up from fourteen in Volume One, twelve in Volume Two, thirteen in Volume Three and ten in Volume Four. The campaign introduced the three chapters by their stories rather than their titles, promising “Hope as Jordan tries to make it work with Roxy! Despair as Rachel reaches for a relationship she can’t have! Cringe as Abbey nearly blows Stacy’s cover!” In print, Fashion Disaster is slotted between Local Area and Small Fry, There’s a Chance follows Total Recall, and Afterglow, a Rachel chapter, comes right after Class of 2008 as the final comic. The three chapters are book-exclusive, as are “Meet the Cast” and the teaser page.

Kickstarter campaign

Veronica and Oliver ran the “Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Five” Kickstarter for 28 days, from February 6 to March 7, 2017. Their pitch kept things simple: “Every couple of years, we put another part of the story into a lovingly-made new book. It’s time for the fifth!” Its 372 backers pledged $37,232 toward a $15,000 goal.

Silver Edition backers received a cover sticker, a Matt keychain charm and a drawn-in sketch. The Gold Edition used a “specialer cover sticker” and added a relationship chart poster and signed extras. Sixty-seven backers chose “Complete Your Collection”, more than any other tier. They received whichever earlier BCB books they were missing, though Volume One came only as an eBook, “because we ran out”. Two $800 tiers offered either the original hand-painted Volume Five cover, “complete with laser-cut logo overlaid!”, or the hand-painted Volume Four cover, which the pair still had on hand.

The stretch goals were all about merchandise. At $25,000, backers unlocked a Daisy plush (“we’re completing the quartet!”). At $30,000, they unlocked double-layered acrylic charms covering ten characters, with a free charm thrown in for every Gold Edition. During the campaign, the authors said they thought they could deliver “another book of anxious teenagers in May”. The finished book went on general sale on August 28, with the plush and charms right alongside it.

Availability

The BCB Store began selling Volume Five as a hardcover on August 28, 2017, both on its own and as part of a 1,840-page “mega book bundle” of the whole series. An eBook edition was also offered as a Kickstarter reward, and the complete BCB eBook library has turned up as a reward in later campaigns.

On March 30, 2026, during the Anniversary Sale, the store warned that Volume One and Volume Five were “about to run out! FOREVER!”, ahead of its temporary closure that April for Veronica and Oliver’s move to Australia. For comparison, Volume Four is already eBook-only. Veronica has said the original book won’t be reprinted, though its chapters “will definitely be in the next Omnibus”.