Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume One

Volume One

Publication date	June 20, 2011 (First edition) December 1, 2017 (Paperback)
Pages	592
ISBN	978-0-9836022-0-0 (First edition) 978-0-9836022-7-9 (Paperback)
Followed by	Starting Over (Volume Two)

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume One is the first book collection of Bittersweet Candy Bowl, a 592-page hardcover released on June 20, 2011 and reissued as a paperback in late 2017. It collects 47 chapters of the comic, everything from Simple Pleasures through New Beginnings, covering the strip’s first three years. The book predates the comic’s Kickstarter era. Its chapters were later rewritten and redrawn for Omnibus 1, making Volume One the first of the comic’s obsolete volumes.

Back cover blurb

Michael is torn between a long-distance childhood crush and a short-distance childhood admirer - not that she’d ever admit it!

Can a prickly, conflicted loner like Lucy ever get what she wants from Michael? And can they and their friends survive high school with their hearts intact?

This volume collects 47 chapters from the online comic, with over 30 pages of new material.

Contents

The back cover of Volume One.

The book is black and white inside and takes its time getting to chapter one. A share-but-don’t-pirate notice on the inside cover, signed by Veronica and Oliver, comes first. Then the seven-page “Opening” comic introduces the cast: Lucy walks the reader through Daisy, David, Paulo, Yashy and Mike. The comic turns self-referential by the end, with the interior title page landing right in the middle of the punchline on page nine.

A two-page table of contents follows. After it, a one-page “Before you start reading” note — drawn as a comic starring the author’s human self-caricature — covers the comic’s notebook-scribble origins and the restoration work behind the book.

The 47 chapters and 13 intermissions run from there to the bonus block on page 576. A one-page “In the Next Volume” teaser for Volume Two closes the book out.

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	Prom Preparation
7	Helping Hands
8	Show and Tell
9	Pep Rally
Intermission	Catty Remarks
10	Off to the Movies
11	Puppy Love
12	Confrontation
13	Aftermath
14	Field Day
15	Unfulfilled Fantasy
16	Farewell, Middle School
Intermission	Mike’s Birthday
17	Blurry Memories
Intermission	Yashy’s Birthday
18	Hot Pursuit
19	Enter High School
20	A Difficult Choice
21	A New Leaf
22	Wardrobe Malfunction
Intermission	Daisy’s Birthday
23	Humble Approach
24	Unmerry Melodies
25	Left Behind
26	Misunderstanding and Change
Intermission	Lucy’s Birthday
27	Of Little Monsters and Pockets
28	Feline Festivities
Intermission	Do Ask, Do Tell
29	Midterm Time
30	Troubled Waters
Intermission	Wishful Thinking
31	Carry On
Intermission	Break Time
32	Follow Me
33	Onwards to Adventure
Intermission	Box of Tricks
34	Bonding
35	Tread Carefully
Intermission	Hydrothunder Tantrum
36	Under Pressure
37	Crash and Burn
Intermission	Out of the Frame
38	A Different Side
Intermission	Birthday Double-Team
39	Rising Temperature
40	Love My Way
41	Moving On
Intermission	Having Kittens
42	Invitation
43	Arrival
44	Search and Rescue
45	Intervention
46	Return
47	New Beginnings
Bonus	Got It Made
Bonus	Cardcaptor Rachel
Bonus	Gone Fishing
	Find-A-Word
Bonus	Sweet Surprises
	Build Your Own Roseville Town

Obsolete chapters

Even in 2011, this was not a straight reprint of the website. The author’s note up front puts it plainly. “Scans are cleaned up, dialogue is refined, and certain chapters were rewritten and replaced.” In the preorder announcement, the authors described one completely redrawn chapter and two completely new ones, plus “something like 30 new comic pages and 50 new illustrations worth of stuff that you haven’t seen”, though they never said which chapters were which. The table above gives Flirting with Disaster a different name entirely, “Misunderstanding and Change”. In a smaller change, the book prints Midterm Time as “Mid-term Time”. Veronica was still calling the former by its book title in 2018, when she promised it would one day be made “WAY LESS CARTOONISHLY MELODRAMATIC”.

Between 2017 and 2021, the authors substantially rewrote and redrew the first three volumes for the Omnibus, then reworked the books’ 69-chapter span with new chapters and new canon. They also completely redrew hundreds of Volume One’s lined-paper pages. Oliver said the old chapters would stay accessible because “the new stuff is too different to just explain it away as an art edit”. The site now files the book under the Obsolete Volumes section of its archive; see also List of obsolete chapters.

Bonus sections

The bonus block opens with a hand-lettered “BONUS” divider and runs to page 591. For the Volume Five Kickstarter, the authors counted fourteen pages of bonus comics in Volume One.

• Got It Made is a one-page, eighteen-panel comic drawn in pencil on lined notebook paper. A scarfed cat feigns depression, cheerfully admits he’s actually happy, and teases his companion to tears.
• Cardcaptor Rachel is a one-page magical-girl parody, played as a dream sequence complete with Japanese song lyrics. A Cardcaptor Rachel charm had gone on sale two months before the book did.
• Gone Fishing is the longest of the bonus comics at six pages, opening with some educational narration about sharks. It was published on the website on the book’s release date and has a chapter page of its own.
• Find-A-Word is a full-page word search. Daisy, Yashy, Catherine, Sandy and Field Day all turn up in the grid.
• Sweet Surprises is a one-page feature sitting between the word search and the paper town.
• Build Your Own Roseville Town is four pages of paper-craft cutouts to colour, cut and assemble. There’s a Mike with a colour-your-own scarf, a Daisy with paste-on glasses, and a bully whose “heinous” face you draw in yourself, plus a classroom and tree backdrop. A printed note at the end admits that the joke “works a whole lot better if you just cut up your book for some ridiculous set of flimsy paper characters.”

Kickstarter campaign

Volume One never had a Kickstarter campaign; it predates BCB’s crowdfunding era. The authors later recalled first raising money for it in 2010. They opened site preorders on May 27, 2011 and pitched “a gigantic, two-inch thick hardcover collection of everything up to ‘New Beginnings’”. US readers got a preorder discount, while readers anywhere could order the Sketch Edition, a preorder-only variant that Veronica signed and sketched in the back (“Make whatever request you like!”) while the authors were still in the USA. For cheaper international shipping, the authors arranged sales through Amazon.com. They finished the initial shipments by the end of July 2011 and put the hardcover on sale worldwide.

Availability

The hardcover ran out in October 2016, and for a while that looked permanent. Veronica said in mid-2017 that the book “wasn’t going to be reprinted”, and Volume Five Kickstarter backers who asked for Volume One in their book bundles got an eBook instead, “because we ran out”. The authors reversed course that November with a “limited second run” in paperback, released December 1, 2017. It sold through the BCB store and was fully in stock by February 2018. Per Oliver at the time, “we only printed a few hundred of them, and we don’t plan on printing more”. The eBook edition, sold from 2013, has been a free download from the site’s archive since May 24, 2021, when Volumes One through Three were formally retired as obsolete volumes.