Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Three

Volume Three

Publication date	December 10, 2013
Pages	260
ISBN	978-0-9836022-3-1
Preceded by	Starting Over (Volume Two)
Followed by	Volume Four

Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Three is the third hardcover collection of the webcomic, 260 pages long and released on December 10, 2013. It collects chapters 61 through 69, Rehearsal through At Loose Ends, and was the first BCB book to be printed in full color. Backers funded the printing through a 2013 Kickstarter campaign, doubling the goal and paying for the comic’s new web server while they were at it. The book sits between Starting Over and Volume Four, and it is the last of the three volumes later made obsolete by Omnibus 1.

Back cover blurb

Between parties, sleepovers and elections, high school can get complicated! But extracurricular activities are the least of Paulo’s worries as he juggles his commitment to a fledgling new romance with the demands of a (girl)friend in need. In this third collection of the online comic, it all reaches boiling point as new revelations push the students of Roseville High to their emotional limits.

Contents

The back cover of Volume Three.

The cover carries the series logo in rounded bubble lettering and a single byline, “Veronica Vera”. The smallprint page behind it credits the story and art to Veronica, with additional writing and design by Oliver Bareham. It swaps the usual rights boilerplate for a hand-lettered request (“We’d love you to share your eBook with friends. But please don’t distribute it online.”) and a note that similarities to talking animals, real or imagined, are purely coincidental.

A teal “Contents” page follows, thirteen dotted-leader entries above a full-color drawing of six of the cast. In place of a cast-introduction section, a four-page Recap comic catches newcomers up before the chapters begin.

The chapters themselves run from Rehearsal to At Loose Ends, nine chapters that originally appeared online between November 2010 and January 2012, with two intermissions breaking up the middle. The back of the book holds the Adult Supervision bonus comic and a one-page “In the next volume…” teaser, which promises “the biggest bombshell…ever!” before admitting “We said that LAST time!”

Table of contents

Chapter	Title
	Recap
61	Rehearsal
62	Feline Filibuster
63	Pillow Talk
Intermission	Raw and Uncensored
64	Call Waiting
Intermission	On the Sidelines
65	Carry Me
66	On Our Own
67	Fade Away
68	December
69	At Loose Ends
Bonus	Adult Supervision

Obsolete chapters

Volume Three sits at the very end of the comic’s rewritten era. The first three volumes were substantially rewritten and redrawn between 2017 and 2021, and Omnibus 1 took over as the canonical print edition of “the entire 69-chapter span of Volume One to Volume Three”. Chapters after this book will only be “tweaked and re-edited” for future omnibuses rather than redrawn, per Oliver. For the differences, see List of obsolete chapters.

In its own day, mind you, the book ran ahead of the website. Oliver re-read the comic about ten times while preparing each volume, making corrections as he went, and every page on the site was then updated with the book’s new dialogue and art tweaks.

The exclusives have mostly caught up since. On the Sidelines and Adult Supervision joined the online archive in the site’s May 2021 overhaul, while the Recap and the one-page “Raw and Uncensored” intermission stayed between the covers.

Bonus sections

By the authors’ own count, Volume Three carries thirteen pages of bonus comics.

The Recap opens with the headline “So if you missed the last 750 pages…” and spends four pages doing exactly that, hand-lettered in a simplified two-tone blue style. It marches through the whole cast until the characters get sick of it themselves. One asks “Ugh, are we really defined by who’s dating who?” and gets the answer “Oh, why not?”

“Raw and Uncensored” is a one-page intermission between Pillow Talk and Call Waiting, and remains exclusive to this book. On the Sidelines, a three-page intermission later in the run, also made its debut here.

Adult Supervision, the nine-page bonus comic at the back, was funded as a stretch goal partway through the campaign. It’s a babysitting story, drawn in a loose colored style quite unlike the main comic.

Kickstarter campaign

Volume Three was funded through the Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume Three (…and more!) Kickstarter campaign, which ran for eighteen days in November 2013 after nearly nine months of preparation. The “and more” was a web server. Alongside the print run, the campaign raised money for a Mac mini to host the site, with “server patron” tiers offering to etch backers’ chosen character art into the machine’s casing. That server was eventually deployed in December 2015.

The campaign more than doubled its $12,500 goal, closing at $25,761.57. A total of 363 people backed it, giving the authors “more backers than ever before”. Last-minute PayPal pledges pushed the combined total past the $26,000 stretch goal. Rewards ran from the eBook and the hardcover through “pile-o’-cats” book bags, all the way up to a $1,500 tier to direct a full chapter of the comic, which found exactly one backer. The extra funding unlocked upgraded book bags, “special trimmings to the book itself” and the nine-page bonus chapter.

The authors finalized the proofs and printing schedules before the campaign launched, so the books could be “printed and packaged 3 days after this project ends” and quite possibly reach American doors by Christmas. Looking back from the Volume Five campaign, the authors reported shipping Volume Three on time.

Availability

Volume Three went on general sale in the BCB Store on February 17, 2014, billed as “the first BCB book in full colour” with “two new book-exclusive chapters. One which is rather torturous to poor Mike”. A “Color Bundle” also offered it together with Starting Over, Ask Roseville High and the Upstage card game.

The hardcover is the book’s only known print edition. The eBook began life as a Kickstarter reward in PDF, CBZ and Kindle formats, and since the May 2021 archive overhaul it has been a free download from the site’s obsolete volumes archive.