Bittersweet Candy Bowl

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About

Want to learn a little more about the comic? Well, maybe you should go read it. But if you are lost, confused or otherwise craving incidental information and pictures, this page goes into detail about the characters, story and background of the comic.

Oh, if you stumbled over here with the idea that it’s a good way to get into the comic, good on you—but you might be better served at the “Introduction” page. It gives you a rough idea of what is happening, and even a suggested way to catch up on only the plot-related chapters of the story!

The Story

Bittersweet Candy Bowl is essentially a high school drama-comedy. Or, “dramedy”. It follows a group of friends from middle school to junior year, and focuses on the relationships between each character. Lucy, Michael, Paulo, Daisy, David and Sandy grew up together at the same schools, and in the comics posted here you see the most interesting years of their school days.

There are a lot of small plots about everyday things the characters engage in (which could annoyingly be called “slice of life”.) The more drawn-out ordeals depicted in the comic concern the introduction of characters like Abbey and Augustus, Lucy’s ongoing struggle to figure out what she really thinks about Mike, Daisy’s deliberations about her self-image, and Abbey’s efforts to confront family issues from his childhood. The comic is written in chapters for a reason: it’s most rewarding when read in depth, as each storyline builds upon another.

Cast of Characters

A full list of the major and minor characters of the story follows—basically anyone who appears more than a couple of times! Click any character image to see an expanded picture.

Major Characters

Lucy

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Nov 7
Age: 15

Our female protagonist. An occasionally friendly Khao Manee, Lucy has a sensitive side and is wrought with insecurities, but would rather punch you in the face than expose them.

Michael

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Aug 10
Age: 15

Our humble male protagonist. A generally easy-going, thoughtful Korat, Michael (or “Mike” or “Maishul”) is adored by most girls but they end up causing most of his problems. He is an excellent runner, much to Lucy’s dismay.

Daisy

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Sep 27
Age: 15

Smart and cheerful, Daisy spends a lot of her time studying alongside cheerleading. A Selkirk Rex and Ragamuffin mix, she longs to be considered more than the group’s “little sister”.

Paulo

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Apr 16
Age: 15

Bold and brazen, Paulo regularly hits on girls and is often competitive with his friends. Always interested in impressing others, this womanising Somali genuinely concerns for his friends and is a good confidant.

David

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Feb 22
Age: 14

An eternally chipper, dimwitted chocolate Labrador Retriever and Paulo’s best friend, David could generally be considered as the comic relief of the story but he sometimes makes very astute observations.

Abbey

First Chapter: #23
Birthday: Jul 25
Age: 15

A chivalrous new member of the group, Abbey’s struggle with his troubled past sometimes shows in his behaviour. He is kind and helpful to others, but if this Abyssinian’s moral code is broken, he can lash out.

Minor characters

Yashy

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Sep 1

Lucy’s first pet. Yashy is something of a prodigy, although her intelligence is put to questionable use (like insulting others). She is bratty, loudmouthed, and harsh, but remains well-beloved.

Chirpy

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Apr 7

Childish and innocent, Chirpy is attached to Yashy as she believes her to be her mother. Always in awe of the world around her, she follows others but always tries to do the right thing. She tends to give everyone simplistic nicknames.

Lily

First Chapter: #1
Birthday: Dec 20

Another pet, Lily is a voice of wisdom for her owner Lucy and others that come to her for advice. She is understanding and patient and is usually able to steer people in the right direction. Basically, a plot device.

Blur

First Chapter: #2
Birthday: Jul 12

Mike’s pet, he was rescued from a fire when young and suffers from amnesia (hence the name!) He is best friends with Yashy and they are constantly playing together, arguing, or annoying Mike and Lucy.

Sue

First Chapter: #4
Birthday: Jan 4
Age: 15

Always hanging around behind the scenes, this European Burmese’s interest in the dramatic doesn’t always extend to the conflicts between Mike, Lucy, Paulo et al. Bright and easygoing, Sue would much rather be acting, directing or taking photos, honestly.

Amaya

First Chapter: #4
Birthday: Dec 11
Age: 15

Local popcorn merchant Amaya is a surprisingly quiet Tabby, at least most of the time. In fact, she is essentially a mute, choosing not to speak out of some weird plot continuity decision on the part of the author. Her job at the cinema is sometimes useful to those who know her.

Katie

First Chapter: #5
Birthday: Feb 1
Age: 15

A precocious Golden Retriever, Katie spends her time worrying about how to look and what to wear, and is rewarded by her position as probably the most popular girl at school. She’s not necessarily mean and cruel in her actions.. she just doesn’t think too much about others.

Stacy

First Chapter: #6
Birthday: Dec 17
Age: 15

Katie’s best friend. Inexplicably fluent in the written word, Stacy’s peers haven’t deterred her from a passion for reporting, fiction and poetry.

Sandy

First Chapter: #15
Birthday: Mar 14
Age: 16

The Sunny Funny to Mike’s Parappa, Sandy is the enigmatic light on the horizon that ensures Mike’s frustrating unavailablity. After moving away and starting a long-distance relationship, she has had some success as a model.

Jasmine

First Chapter: #55
Birthday: Aug 14
Age: 14

A peppy young girl in freshman year, Jasmine immediately took a liking to Paulo and has taken the role of both his girlfriend and partner-in-crime.

Flower Girl

First Chapter: #9
Birthday: March 27
Age: 15

This mysterious girl is absent from just about everything besides David’s fantasies. While she remains unaware, she has completely captured David’s affections, and he spends a lot of his time clumsily stalking her.

Jessica

First Chapter: #32
Birthday: Mar 15
Age: 16

A year older than the main characters, Jessica is an approachable member of the cheerleading team that, while kindhearted, is never afraid to offer an opinion on things important to her. She does not get along very well with Tess.

Rachel

First Chapter: #32
Birthday: Feb 11
Age: 16

Jessica’s closest friend, Rachel is soft-spoken and cheerful. Like Jessica, she holds a grudge against Tess for reasons nobody wants to talk about.

Molly

First Chapter: #39
Birthday: May 5
Age: 10

Molly seems to have an endless reserve of childish positivity, despite suffering the same setbacks as her older brother Abbey. She is a dedicated member of the local girl scouts troop, and loves her brother dearly.

Justin

First Chapter: #33
Birthday: Oct 12
Age: 8

A hapless kid dragged into various misadventures by other members of the cast, Justin is generally seen looking for cover and wishing he could just go back home.

Augustus

First Chapter: #31
Birthday: Oct 1
Age: 18

You may know him as “Final Fantasy Cat”. Augustus is calm, composed, and has biting wit. A lot of people end up hating him because of it, but he doesn’t seem to mind, as long as his purposes are served.

Tess

First Chapter: #19
Birthday: Dec 13
Age: 18

Half Ragdoll and half Bengal, Tess is a filthy rich rebel. She met the group as they entered high school, and has hung around them ever since. Tess drinks a bit and likes to help others, but she’ll have to move on pretty soon.

Carter

First Chapter: #19

He loves Lucy.

McCain

First Chapter: #32
Age: 16

Alec “McCain” McCain is one of those background characters that remains detached and logical in any situation, even if it doesn’t earn him any points with the others. He is most often seen being told to shut up by those who don’t value his blunt pronouncements.

About the Author

The comic you are currently leafing through is the result of pens, paper, computers and Veronica “Taeshi” Vera. Ecuadorian by birth, migrant to the United States and eventual resident of Sydney, Australia (pictured). Drawing cats since she was seven, Bittersweet Candy Bowl is kind of a formal way to tell a story using the characters she’s had floating around in her head since forever. It’s a learning comic! After this, she will take on the world with the skills she has developed and tell the Naruto/My Little Pony crossover story she has been plotting for years.

You may have bumped into her on deviantART or around Sonic websites back in the day (and by day we mean last millenium.) She’s currently 24 years old, and is studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts at COFA, after doing half of a Bachelor of Education at UTS and some psychology classes at Rutgers.

She lives with her boyfriend slash HASBANDO Oliver “SuitCase” Bareham who helps with editing, writing and all the technical/business side of things. He’s of the same age and is currently in his last year of law school. His site, Soaringrabbit.com has more detail if you want it!

FAQ

The following is an attempt at answering a few common questions. If you have more, check out Taeshi's Formspring.

When does the comic update?: When there’s buffer, the comic will update on the first few seconds of any given Monday, Wednesday or Friday. If you live in New York. So: 12AM EST. If there’s no buffer, we always endeavour to update sometime on the Monday, Wednesday or Friday — meaning anywhere up to 11:59 EST.
What does Bittersweet Candy Bowl mean?: Taeshi’s friend Lily suggested it. It’s about the intermingling of personalities in the comic! Kind of.
Who is Souppy and what does he have to do with the comic?: Souppy is Taeshi’s nickname for SuitCase, who does most of the work behind the site, store, BCI, advertising, etc. Some people seem to think it’s a case of a writer/artist team, which is not really the case—Taeshi writes and draws the comic and has established the main story and made all the characters, though SuitCase edits dialogue and occasionally he will script out stretches of the story.
Wait, your footer says BCB started in 2006? But it seems like it’s a newer comic than that.: That’s because until 2007 or so, it was only posted to Taeshi’s deviantART, and while it did have a small website after 2007, it took until November 2009’s big relaunch for it to act like a real webcomic. You can think of it as a series that “launched” in late 2009, albeit with a large archive and a small fanbase composed of friends.
Do you run all of the BCB characters’ Twitter accounts?: No, those are fan-made. Taeshi and SuitCase update @HotSomali92 and that’s all. The only other official Twitter is @bcbcomic, which is mostly robotic.
Are you a furry?: No! This is something we kind of regret. The comic was based on cat characters Taeshi developed from watching cartoons and reading Garfield when she was a small child. They have nothing to do with furries and fursonas and the world of anthropomorphic fetishists. While there are some animal traits in the comic, there’s no particular fascination with that stuff, and it should hopefully be perceived as on par with Disney or Looney Tunes or whatever. In other words: if we were to start from scratch, they’d probably all be humans.
Do you hate furries?: No, but we think it’s upsetting for BCB to be marginalised as a furry comic. We don’t mind if furries enjoy BCB, but we don’t want non-furries to assume that we’re trying to appeal to people with a particular interest in anthropomorphic characters. We feel similarly to the author of Lackadaisy in this regard.
How much of the comic is written out and prepared?: Overall there tends to be 5–20 pages sitting in the super secret buffer directory, if that’s what you mean. If you’re asking more generally, we know where the story is going to go, but it’s not all in script form covering years or anything. At most, there’s 40 pages in buffer/planning at a given time.
How long does it take to draw a page?: Taeshi draws in batches of pages in multiple steps, so this is not straightforward. We think it’s something like an hour to sketch, an hour or more to ink, then 3–6 hours to colour. 8 hours isn’t a bad guesstimate.
What tools and materials do you use?: Taeshi uses a mechanical pencil with blue lead to do sketching, on nice A4 paper. She does her panelling with the aid of a small, breakable T-square ruler. She inks with a mixture of Sakura Micron pens and Copic brush pens. Then, she scans it in with a huge Epson photo scanner at 600 dpi, runs some Photoshop actions to clear out the blue sketch, and colours the inked outlines using an Intuos 4 tablet on a 15” MacBook Pro. Then, some final filters and stuff are applied before the image is exported for the website.
Why do the older pages look so bad?: Like with most webcomics, the older pages are crude and awful relative to the new ones. But this one is worse! As for years it wasn’t really supposed to be anything more than an occasional sketch to be shared with deviantART friends. The current archive is actually Photoshopped to hell and back, as pencil on lined paper tends to look pretty awful once scanned. Please forgive the simplicity of earlier chapters, there really is a radical jump in quality later!
Did Taeshi make all the characters?: No. Tess was created by Lily, Carter and Carson by Evan, and Kizuna by Shinoka. Since the time Taeshi introduced these characters into the story, BCB has had a huge quantity of fancharacters created for it, but they stay in the fan realm now. (You might have noticed we’re trying to phase fancharacters out anyway.)
When will the comic end?: There is indeed an ending planned, as well as a “bad ending” which will be released after the comic is done. It’s hard to say how long it’ll take to get there, but a guess is around 2013. There is a finite story to tell with these characters, it’s just a matter of spending the time to tell it.
What are the rules on clothing in the BCB universe?: Clothing is optional. To wear nothing is to be kind of plain, ordinary, casual. Wearing an outfit usually means you’re somehow making a statement. This is confusing if you’re into complicated furry universes, we guess, but it’s how the characters were always drawn and it never seemed that weird to us until people started asking about it.
Who is the black bird in the page navigation and error pages?: His name is Error. He comes from the old BCB comics, where if Taeshi made a mistake she’d scribble black over them, draw an outline of a bird, and leave him in the scene.
Is it alright posting links to incentive comics and Bittersweet Club International exclusive content everywhere?: We’d prefer BCI members to respect the purpose of keeping it exclusive and.. to not do that. For publicly posted incentive comics and stuff, we will delete any link to it from our page comments and forums, but we’re totally cool if you want to post on imageboards and other forums.
Do Mike and Lucy end up together?: No.

If you’d like, you can head back to the home page!

Page last updated May 30th, 2011.