Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Seven

Volume Seven

Publication date	September 1, 2024
Pages	420
ISBN	978-1-955454-00-1
Preceded by	Volume Six

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Seven is the seventh printed collection of the webcomic, a 420-page hardcover released in 2024. It collects Chapters 97 through 110, from After You to Eternal Flame, the stretch of the comic dealing with Lucy’s return to Roseville High. It follows Volume Six and is the biggest volume since Volume One. The book was funded by a 2024 Kickstarter campaign alongside an Augustus plush and a Lucy figurine, and it is the only place to read the book-exclusive Halloween chapter Good Egg.

Back cover blurb

Returning home with newfound resolve, Lucy’s facing a lot of friends she just isn’t sure are good for her anymore. But when everybody’s clamoring for attention — including the one who left her so broken she left in the first place — is it really so easy to switch off and break out on your own? Unstable relationships, unsurprising standoffs and unlikely reconciliations abound in this 420-page volume of the online comic.

Contents

The back cover of Volume Seven.

The cover shows a trick-or-treating scene at dusk, with five costumed cats and all. Inside, the colophon page pairs its smallprint with a cartoon of two cats reading and a friendly plea, signed by Veronica and Oliver, to share the eBook with friends but not post it online. The credits read “Story and art by Veronica Vera” and “Additional writing and design by Oliver Bareham”, and the whole thing is typeset in Whitney.

The table of contents fits on a single page, with every chapter floating in its own colored circle. In the two-page “Meet the Cast” section, Lucy, Paulo, Mike, Daisy, Augustus, Abbey and Matt each get full-body art and a few lines on how they’re doing as the volume opens.

Fourteen numbered chapters from the webcomic appear here, along with the intermission Sugar Substitute. Each opens on a solid-color title page with its own little circular emblem. The book-exclusive Good Egg is slotted in between Witch Hunt and College Material. The final page, “In the Next Volume”, teases Volume Eight.

Table of contents

Chapter	Title
	Meet the Cast
97	After You
98	Moments Apart
99	PDA
100	High Expectations
101	Mutual Assurance
102	Escape Route
103	It’s All in the Mind
104	Fair Game
Intermission	Sugar Substitute
105	Witch Hunt
Intermission	Good Egg
106	College Material
107	Unwanted Gift
108	Time Out
109	Popularity Contest
110	Eternal Flame

Obsolete chapters

None of this book’s content has gone obsolete. Volume Seven is not one of the rewritten early volumes, and its chapters match the website’s canonical layout. The authors’ stated policy for everything after Volume Three is that chapters “won’t be redrawn, but they will be tweaked and re-edited to be as nice as we can make them”, and no Volume Seven chapters appear on the List of obsolete chapters. If anything, the difference runs the other way, since Good Egg is canonical material that exists only in this book.

Bonus sections

The headline bonus is Good Egg, a short Halloween-themed chapter made to complement Witch Hunt and never published online. The Kickstarter’s only hint at its contents was the joke “Eggs were thrown, but no weepy frogs were harmed in its production.” Beyond that and “Meet the Cast” up front, the volume travels light on extras. Oliver explained back in 2021 that the book was “already gonna be so huge we might not have room to just throw in a dozen or more mini-comics. Volume Eight?!”

The last printed page, “In the Next Volume”, is a one-page teaser for Volume Eight. Its seven diagonal wedge panels promise “Tearful consultations..”, “Awkward walks..” and “an explosive double date!”

Kickstarter campaign

The book was funded through the Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume Seven campaign, which ran on Kickstarter from April 26 to May 25, 2024. By the time it closed, 344 backers had pledged $43,725 toward its $20,000 goal. In a February newspost, the authors had already pointed fans to April 26, teasing “maybe a new book? Maybe a new book and more” and promising a launch stream.

Backers funded the book alongside two pieces of merchandise. The Augustus plush came with a removable cape and a Kickstarter-exclusive hoodie “borrowed from Jordan’s wardrobe”, while the 3.8-inch Lucy figurine hid an 8GB USB drive under her removable head, preloaded with the complete BCB eBook library. Backers could pick up a regular hardcover or a signed Limited Edition with a Kickstarter-only cover sticker and a personalized character sketch by Veronica. Sixty-seven of them went for the signed version. One tier bundled Volumes One through Seven, the Omnibus and Ask Roseville High in PDF and E Ink formats, and the top tier, taken by three backers, was a commissioned comic of six to fifteen pages. Stretch goals unlocked six exclusive character-pair stickers, included free with every Limited Edition, plush or figurine pledge.

The campaign pitched the book as “the biggest volume since the first we printed”, one that “tears up hopeful relationships, asserts its boundaries and rips your heart out — right when things were looking wholesome again”. It signed off with “This is our eighth Kickstarter project. Eighth! We know what we are doing!”

Availability

The hardcover went on general sale at the BCB store in December 2024, billed as “our heftiest hardcover yet”. An eBook edition exists too, offered in PDF and E Ink formats through the Kickstarter. As of April 2026, however, the online store is closed while Veronica and Oliver relocate to Australia, and book orders are paused until their stock reaches a fulfillment warehouse.