Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Four

Volume Four

Publication date	August 1, 2016
Pages	324
ISBN	978-0-9836022-5-5
Preceded by	Volume Three
Followed by	Volume Five

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Four is the fourth printed collection of the comic, a 324-page hardcover released on August 1, 2016. It collects Chapters 70 through 80, running from Piece of Cake to Happy Hour, and was funded by the 2015 “Book, Plush & Merch Extravaganza” Kickstarter. It was never reprinted. Copies are now scarce enough that the authors joke about fans stalking them on eBay. It follows Volume Three and precedes Volume Five.

Back cover blurb

Mike has reunited with the girl of his dreams, but a dramatic departure is about to become the stuff of Paulo’s nightmares.

Will a booze-fueled night of intimate confessions bring the gang together or tear fragile relationships apart?

This fourth volume of the online comic features over twenty pages of new material.

Contents

The back cover of Volume Four.

Both covers show beach scenes painted in watercolor, with the series title in rounded bubble letters on the front and the blurb sitting in the middle of the scene on the back. When a fan theorized that BCB covers show which ships are going to sink, the official Tumblr replied “Volume Four had Paulo and Rachel :^)”.

Inside, the smallprint page carries the credits (story and art by Veronica Vera, additional writing and design by Oliver Bareham) and notes the book is typeset in Tramuntana. It also has a little painting of a floppy-eared character balancing a book on their head, along with a very sincere disclaimer that reads “Cats and dogs do not talk. This could not possibly be about something real. This is a work of fiction.”

A plain table of contents follows, and then “Meet the Cast”, a two-page spread of twelve square portraits. Each character gets a short status blurb catching new readers up on where everyone stands going into the volume. David’s reads, in full, “Does not do very much in this volume, but that’s fine with him.”

The main run covers the eleven chapters from Piece of Cake to Happy Hour, with three book-exclusive bonus chapters slotted between them at the right points in the timeline. The back matter holds a fourth bonus comic, printed full-bleed on black pages.

Table of contents

Chapter	Title
	Meet the Cast
70	Piece of Cake
71	Just Beautiful
72	Buddy System
73	Ten Seconds to Midnight
Bonus	Curtain Rising
74	Curtain Call
75	Breaking Up
76	Leaving Home
77	Study Buddy
78	Safe Boundaries
Bonus	No Service
79	Critical Hit
Bonus	Critical Eye
80	Happy Hour

Obsolete chapters

Volume Four has none. Its chapters were never rewritten the way the first three volumes’ were, and everything it collects is still current canon on the website; see List of obsolete chapters.

Bonus sections

The book carries four bonus chapters, and the official arithmetic on how much new material that adds up to depends on who’s counting. The back cover promises “over twenty pages of new material”. A launch newspost says “32 pages of book-exclusive content”, while the Volume Five Kickstarter later counted “ten in Volume Four” specifically when tallying pages of bonus comics.

• Curtain Rising is a two-page short about Sue and Jessica, placed between Ten Seconds to Midnight and the chapter it shares a title with, Curtain Call.
• No Service sits after Safe Boundaries, ahead of Critical Hit.
• Critical Eye is a companion piece to Critical Hit, printed directly after it.
• Payback is a six-page story about Jasmine and her friends’ trip to the Roseville cinema, tucked in after Happy Hour. It isn’t listed in the book’s own table of contents, so readers only find it by turning past the final chapter.

The last printed page is an “In the Next Volume” teaser, a page of diagonal panels promising “First job?”, “First fight?!” and, reassuringly, “S-still in watercolor ..”.

Kickstarter campaign

Volume Four was funded by “Bittersweet Candy Bowl’s Book, Plush & Merch Extravaganza!”, the authors’ fourth Kickstarter and, by their own description, their biggest yet. The book shared the campaign with three plush toys (Mike, Lucy and Paulo) and a pile of other merchandise, against a $25,000 goal the authors admitted was “far from assured”. It ran from November 6 to December 5, 2015. By the close, 295 backers had pledged $29,864.04. The campaign video showed off the plush prototypes.

The book itself came in three flavors. The standard hardcover was the $45 tier. The $65 Silver Edition added a metallic embossed cover sticker (“It will probably have text on it saying ‘limited edition’”), a character sketch of the backer’s choice, and a prismatic “fireworks” group poster. The authors tied the poster’s print run to the number of Silver Edition backers. The $79 Gold Edition upgraded the sticker to a gold foil stamp. Pledges of $59 and up also received an exclusive charm of Claret, the character behind Daisy’s cosplay in Guest of Honor. At the very top, two one-off tiers sold the actual cover paintings: a $300 draft and the $1,000 hand-painted final. Each measured 16″ × 12″ and had a watercolor logo cut by laser. One backer claimed each tier.

The campaign estimated April 2016 delivery and warned that freight could add one to three months. The finished books shipped through August, with the store launch pegged to a livestream on August 12 and the general on-sale announcement following three days later.

Availability

Volume Four is out of print, and it is staying that way. After Volume Four’s successful launch, an October 2016 sales push sold out Volume One entirely. Physical copies of Volume Four were still available in February 2017, when the Volume Five Kickstarter was offering them. By January 2026, Veronica answered a reprint question with “ebook only, sorry :(” and added that the content would return in Omnibus 2. The authors put their last three copies up for auction in the March 2026 archive sale, including “a prototype that’s a little weird”.

The eBook is a conversion of the first edition, and it is now the only way to buy the original Volume Four. Book sales go through the BCB store, though as of April 2026 the store was closed while the authors moved to Australia.