Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Six

Volume Six

Publication date	December 1, 2018
Pages	312
ISBN	978-0-9836022-8-6
Preceded by	Volume Five
Followed by	Volume Seven

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Six is the sixth hardcover collection of the webcomic, a 312-page book covering Chapters 89 through 96, from Guest of Honor to Unspoken Rule. It follows Volume Five and precedes Volume Seven. Its first edition is dated December 1, 2018, though the finished books didn’t reach readers until early 2019. It was the first BCB book produced entirely in the comic’s limited-palette digital style, and it was funded by a 2018 Kickstarter campaign.

Back cover blurb

Summer’s near, and it’s a time for optimism at Roseville High! Cute mixups at a comic con, volleyball games as the sun sets, and the homecoming of a successful reason to celebrate, don’t you think? Teenage love isn’t ever so easy. In the most colorful volume of the online comic yet, Paulo wrestles with his worst impulses, Abbey crushes what he’s been holding onto far too tight, and Jasmine cleans up some trash. Oh, and Sandy’s not the only bombshell about to land a direct hit upon Mike’s fragile little social life!

Contents

The back cover of Volume Six.

The smallprint page credits story and art to Veronica Vera and additional writing and design to Oliver Bareham. On the same page, a cartoon of two orange cats politely asks readers not to pirate the eBook. Even the fiction disclaimer gets in on the joke. It reads, “In a world where talking animals were commonplace, you might believe this book to be about something real. It is not.”

The table of contents uses solid-colored circles over a pastel flower pattern. On the next two pages, the “Meet the Cast” spread introduces seven characters with full-body art and a short blurb apiece — Mike, Daisy and Paulo on one page, then Abbey, Augustus, Rachel and Lucy on the other.

The main run collects eight chapters and two short intermissions, Test Dummy and Cut Short. The authors fully redrew 25 pages of Golden Hour for print, replacing sketches they had posted on the site. Readers then get the exclusive bonus chapter Unpacking Day, followed by a full-page “In the Next Volume” teaser for Volume Seven.

Table of contents

Chapter	Title
	Meet the Cast
89	Guest of Honor
90	Golden Hour
91	Dial Tone
92	Table for One
93	Clean Slate
94	Model Girlfriend
95	Love Again
Intermission	Test Dummy
96	Unspoken Rule
Intermission	Cut Short
Bonus	Unpacking Day

Obsolete chapters

Volume Six has no obsolete chapters to add to the List of obsolete chapters. If anything, the updates ran in the other direction. In April 2019 the authors pushed the book’s edits back onto the website, updating the archive with its new lettering, art tweaks and improved colors, and uploading the reworked Golden Hour pages to replace the sketchy originals. The book’s edits became part of the canonical online version.

Bonus sections

Beyond the “Meet the Cast” spread described above, the book carries two extras. The first is Unpacking Day, a bonus chapter that has never been published online — “a book-exclusive chapter where Lucy and her mom have a heart-to-heart,” as the authors put it. Veronica finished it on December 4, 2018, the day before her birthday. How the conversation goes is best left to the chapter’s own page.

The final printed page is “In the Next Volume,” a teaser for Volume Seven built from six diagonal wedge panels, with caption balloons promising, among other things, “A date that crashes!”, “Grudges from the past..” and “A consistent style for once!”

Kickstarter campaign

The book was funded by the Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Six Kickstarter, which ran from October 26 to November 27, 2018. It closed at $30,723.00 against an $18,000 goal, with 309 backers along for the ride. It was the authors’ sixth Kickstarter and, in their words, “our fifth order with this printer, who we really like and trust!” The authors pitched the book as “the first volume in this limited-palette digital style.”

The reward tiers came in metals. A $39 pledge got the book itself, while the $59 Silver Edition added a metallic cover sticker, a personalized Sharpie sketch, and three keychain charms — Claret, Matt, and a brand-new Madison. The $79 Gold Edition topped that with a gold sticker, a scratch-and-sniff insert, and one of 75 numbered “sack Lucy” resin figurines. It sold out within days.

That sellout prompted the mid-campaign Platinum Edition, built from the last known box of Lucy figurines. The authors had bought the box back from a stranger’s garage after some of the figurines surfaced on eBay in 2015, mislabeled as a “VERY RARE SONIC THE HEDGE HOG PROTO-TYPE ANGRY GIRL CHARACTER.” One backer paid $320 for “A sad little box of chipped and decapitated Lucy figurines.” A flat $50 add-on offered the entire back catalog, over 2,000 pages of it, as a one-time Black Friday deal. The site announced the successful funding the day after close, with books promised for February.

Availability

The BCB Store began selling Volume Six on April 1, 2019, after the Kickstarter campaign. An eBook conversion of the first edition also exists. As of the comic’s 20th anniversary in March 2026, the book was still in stock — the authors noted they were “almost out of every BCB volume before Volume Six,” but still had this volume available. Volume Four, by comparison, is now eBook-only, as Veronica has confirmed.