Bittersweet Candy Bowl

Webcomic Party

Not much to do with the site, but I worked on this over the weekend! Maybe you’ll like it!

— Taeshi, January 25, 2012

Lucy figurine

Sounds like you should go check out the promo page. Getting this made was a major effort and we hope you really like it!

— SuitCase, December 8, 2011

Something’s coming

BE HERE, TOMORROW.

UPDATE: Guess who fell asleep at the wrong time. COUNTDOWN SLIGHTLY REVISED AND EXTENDED.

— SuitCase, December 7, 2011

Veronica and I on the Webcomic Beacon podcast!

Bittersweet Candy Bowl was featured on an episode of the Webcomic Beacon podcast! It’s a 1hr 22m episode that’s dominated by chatter about the comic, the process of making it, and some other stuff about the high school drama comic - perfect to take your mind off Lucy’s crushed hopes and let you in on bits and pieces about the comic you might not have heard elsewhere. We’re both on there (ha ha, I count as her publicist now) and we’re both happy with how it all turned out!

You should head over to the site or subscribe to the podcast in the iTunes store, give it a listen, and check out some of their archives where they interview other artists, too!

— SuitCase, November 23, 2011

BCB at Supanova Brisbane, November 5–6!

Yes, 95% of our readers, it’s time for a news update that won’t concern you. But if you’re in Australia — or better yet, in Brisbane, Australia — then you may be interested to know that we are going to have a stall in Supanova’s artists’ alley.

This is the same comic convention we did in July in Sydney, but in Brisbane.

We’re going a bit out of our way to get there, and will be packing a heavy suitcase full of books and other trinkets, but in our experience basically every Australian reader of BCB seems to reside in Queensland so we’re hoping we can meet a bunch of new people!

Check out the Supanova website for information on how to buy tickets to attend. Seems like it’s about $24 a day, which seems remarkably cheap to us!

We should be able to bring along some updated merchandise not yet in the store, as well as a minor new item and possibly an UTTERLY AMAZING totally cool new item on par with the book. We hope. You Brisbanians would be the first to get it!

In other news: We’re oh-so-close to 600 books. We’re so happy with the way the books have been selling, and hope the goal can be met right before the beginning of the Christmas season!

— SuitCase, October 19, 2011

Books in Canada, a comic archive update & more!

A bunch of things to report in this update, dear readers!

New store — First of all, we have completely replaced the Store with a newer design! It’s easier to add stuff to your cart and nicer to look at overall. You should check it out, even if just for the cute picture of Daisy being crushed by the pile of boxes.

CANADA NEWS — Canadians, you can now buy the BCB book directly from us! We soon discovered Amazon won’t send our book to Canada, so we came up with an alternate shipping option to suit Canadians. Or, indeed, anybody who doesn’t understand how to work Amazon. Check it out at the store!

Bad Comment filter — You might have noticed we’ve implemented a warning page that sometimes pops up when you try and post a comment. It’s just an attempt to get those making the comment section dull to liven up their posts a little. It catches everyone right after a page update, as well as if you say key annoying words like “first”. Just read what’s on that page if you trigger it, and consider rewriting a comment or not posting at all. We don’t like to be nazis, but we think the majority of the readership who participate in commentary would prefer to read sensible, substantial, topical posts.

Archive update — You may also have noticed a quiet reshuffle of certain chapters to match the organisation of the book. We removed “Cracks in the Ice” and “Up to Bat” entirely, rearranged some incentives for better pacing, and made it so that our original plan for “intermissions” is in place. That is, intermissions basically mean the chapter is fourth-wall-breaking, silly, or non-canonical. Anyway, this change shouldn’t bother you guys, but if you wondered why the numbers changed, this is why!

Dinner Time — Veronica put together a 19 page exclusive comic about Lucy and her family for BCI members. If you are one, log in to read it! If you’re not, why not become one? The comic might at some point be posted as an incentive for something, but it’ll remain permanently available in the membership section.

Book fundraising drive — Finally, we’re 75 books away from reaching our goal! Please consider buying a copy. As an added incentive, once we get to 600 we will un-censor the two new chapters added to the archive: the redone Burden of Parenthood, and Helping Hands. I guess you’d already have them in the book at that point, but hey! Other people might appreciate it. And you could comment on them.

— SuitCase, September 23, 2011

Volume One is finished, printed and ready for worldwide shipping!

We’ve finally completed the initial shipments of Volume One, and are ready to sell to Americans and the world alike. We also took some photos of it, see?

It’s filled with new comics, dialogue and illustrations, all bound in a glossy hardcover. Lots of people seem happy with the book so far, so we hope you’ll be just as pleased!

It’s available for $49 from Amazon.com. And if you want it shipped to the US, we’re still doing the $39 deal. Check out the details on the Store page.

We’re gonna be tweaking the Store page to look less chaotic over the next few days, but it’s all there and ready to order if you like. Thanks for all the support!

— SuitCase, July 29, 2011

Last chance for sketch edition book orders, and free shipping on the store!

So what are these?

If you guessed: part of our first delivery of the actual Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One book, then you're right! 600 pages, they're giant! And the printing quality is terrific. And until Thursday night (when we leave the USA) Veronica and I will be frantically packing and sorting and (in Vero's case) sketching in the back of these things for all of you loyal readers!

This post is essentially your LAST CHANCE to order a sketch edition of Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One, as come Thursday night, we're done, it's over, back to Australia! Of course, we will be organising the "standard" non-sketch book orders next week, which we'd love for you to buy (especially those international people left in the lurch!) but for now, if you want a sketch edition, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE.

Also, while we're at it: free shipping to the USA for general merch continues until the same deadline! Consider buying some merch along with your book, or with no book, or whatever! We have it all with us and would love to lighten our load for the trip back.

Make your purchase on the temporarily-restructured Store page! Thanks!

— SuitCase, July 13, 2011

Off To ConnectiCon!

So, BCBCon 2011 was a success, and this short week has just breezed by, and now it’s time for us to head to Hartford and set up a table at Connecticon. Come visit us! We’ll be selling minis, merchandise, sketches, THE REAL BCB VOLUME 1 BOOK OMG (Saturday-Sunday, we hope), and even new PauloxLucy metal locket things. Exciting!

We will be upstairs in the “artists colony”, which we hear is where you get to look down on the horrible people who got real booths while people around you sell hot pink animu cosplay hair and hand-painted My Little Ponies. It will be truly glamorous, so please, come up and check us out!

Also, uh! We are anxiously awaiting the delivery of books early next week and will be sending them out madly. For now, though, why not buy some stuff on the store? We are offering free shipping to USA people until we leave the country next Friday!

— SuitCase, July 8, 2011

Supanova over, time for the USA!

Hello everyone!

Our table at Supanova was a pretty big success, especially for our first time at a convention! Thank you to everyone who stopped by and said hello, bought things, or even donated in person (gasp!) Veronica churned out a ton of sketches and we sold a lot of minicomics and vinyl stickers. Thanks go to Bridgeotto for hanging out with us and helping us do so well. While Sunday was a pretty dead day, we were so successful that we did indeed make a profit, after accounting for all the insurance and decorations and so on that went with our first table at a convention. Which means we can be more effective in the future, perhaps in Connecticut!

This leads me to the next big thing.. we’re both leaving for America on Friday. (Don’t worry, the page update will be automatic.) This has several implications for you guys:

You can meet us at BCBCon, taking place July 1–4! Here’s the current topic, though I’ll be writing a new one up in the next couple of days. If you can figure out how to get to Boston and have the capacity to pay about $140 to share one of our hotel rooms, all late attendees are welcome! Just post in the BCBCon forum thread.

You can meet us at Connecticon, taking place July 8–10 in Hartford, CT. Any questions or comments should go to the Connecticon forum thread. Of course, you can buy stuff from us there too!

You can save money when buying stuff from us. While we’re in the US we intend to spend a lot preparing the mailout of the books, as well as various other merchandise. Stay tuned and we’ll post shipping discounts on the store for US buyers, so that you can take advantage of the next month we’ll be much closer to you, geographically speaking!

ONE FINAL NOTE: Thanks to the book pre-orderers for their patience. In between studying for corporate law and equity and international law and economics exams I’ve been frantically negotiating to get the book ready for our arrival, and I should be able to email you guys an ETA on delivery when that’s available. It’s obviously looking like late June, but I want to wait until I have something fairly definitive before I flood your mailboxes!

(As before: Yes, we are still taking preorders for Volume 1 of the book. Just click the “Older news posts” link below, and look through the old news posts to find the purchase buttons. Tada.)

— SuitCase, June 22, 2011

BCB at the Supanova Convention, Sydney 18–19 June! (this weekend)

Sydneysiders, don't forget! We're exhibiting in the Artists' Alley at Supanova this weekend. It's taking place at Olympic Park, so get on a train, find the stadium, and pay us a visit at table H1.

See! Right there. We have a big vinyl banner and everything! If you stop by, you can meet Taeshi and myself, buy all the cool BCB merchandise we have on hand (posters! charms!) and get sketches and things done. It's our first con so we will be just as confused as to how it all works as you are.

Also! If you come along, we will have printed mini-comics, made exclusively for Supanova and our coming visit to ConnectiCon. The mini-comics will feature stuff nobody has seen, extracted from various portions of the book.. so why not grab them? POSSIBLY COLLECTABLE.

Find out more at the Supanova website, or check in our Supanova forum topic!

Also: Yes, we are still taking preorders for Volume 1 of the book. Just click the older news posts link before to find the Paypal purchase buttons. Thanks!

— SuitCase, June 16, 2011

Announcing pre-orders for the BCB book!

Volume One of Bittersweet Candy Bowl is complete and will be shipping out in June.

That’s right, it’s a gigantic, two-inch thick hardcover collection of everything up to “New Beginnings”, with revised dialogue and other edits, a completely redrawn chapter, two completely new chapters, and bonus content beyond that. There’s something like 30 new comic pages and 50 new illustrations worth of stuff that you haven’t seen. It’s like 4 or 5 smaller webcomic books combined into one!

We have a pre-order offer, for all of you who have been so patient. It’s for people in the USA only:

<snip> — check the store page, now!

That’s $10 off the retail price of $49, shipped as soon as the print run is complete, next month.

To those outside of the US (and this means Canada and Mexico too), we are arranging with Amazon.com to sell the book through them, instead of using Paypal on our own store. The reason? Cheap shipping. It’s only about $8 to send the book most places in the world, so once we get our listing at Amazon set up, we’ll let you know.

<snip> — check the store page, now!

Sketch Edition

While we’re in the US next month, we want to go through as many books as possible for sketch editions. This will be a pre-order only offer! What you get is the book as above, but signed and sketched in at the back. Make whatever request you like!

The following links are for the Sketch Edition. Because we will ship them personally from the US, we can take pre-orders for any country!

<snip> — check the store page, now!

Canadians should pick the international option. Australians should note that we will ship your Limited Edition copies from Sydney in late July (after our trip!), in order to provide you with cheaper shipping. If you’re impatient, pick the international option above and it’ll go out with the other orders in June.

Thanks, everyone! Expect more information as time goes on, but these pre-order offers are good only for the next couple of weeks!

— SuitCase, May 27, 2011

Seeking attendees for BCBCon 2011: Boston!

BCBCon is going to be a loosely organised reader meetup taking place in Boston, July 1–4 (that’s less than two months away!) Taeshi and myself will be there and so will a bunch of other readers. We’ve been quietly organising it on the forum, which you may not visit (We don’t blame you, IT IS KIND OF TERRIBLE.)

Now the hotel rooms are booked, and 17 people are already confirmed to attend.. but we still have spots left for new people. Anyone who reads BCB is invited, no matter if you comment all the time or never comment at all. There will be a mixture of people we know and don’t know, so don’t be scared of jumping in! We want newcomers.

Of course, we’re staying in a pretty nice Holiday Inn downtown for three nights, so there is a cost involved (around $130 for the whole stay), but by rooming with us you’ll save tons on what should be a fun long weekend in Boston you can share with people who hold a common interest in dramatic cats.

So consider this your official invitation, anonymous or unanonymous BCB reader! Check if you’re free in the first few days of July, get yourselves on the forum and post in the BCBCon topic.

— SuitCase, May 13, 2011

Posters, stickers, new charms and conventions!

Hello again! New store stuff! Check out our new vinyl stickers and charms:

The stickers are really neat, they’re like thin sheets of plastic you can stick and re-stick as often as you like. We also hope that Cardcaptor Rachel and cool dude Augustus will please you. Buy any of them for only $5 each!

Also, let us not forget the two posters we are now selling, both a re-made relationship chart and a wide, vibrantly coloured poster featuring all the main characters. These posters are wonderful quality things, and we’re selling them for $15 each.

Finally, there are some new shirt designs you might have missed! All $18, as always.

The book is really close, too! We will keep you posted, but all the content is complete and it is ready to go into print for a release in June. Keep your eyes on this space, or sign up to our mailing list on the bottom of the store page.

ALSO, CONVENTIONS.

Besides merchandising stuff, we’d like to announce that we’re attending Sydney’s Supanova convention, taking place June 17–19, as well as Hartford, Connecticut’s Connecticon, taking place July 8–10. We have lots of information about both cons at the links, please take a look if you’d like to meet us, buy some stuff and get an autographed book!

FINALLY (I think?) we’re also in the final stages of planning BCBCon, a big BCB reader meetup in Boston from July 1–4. Veronica and I will be attending, and will give you lots of leftover candy and faulty stickers. Read details about how it’s going to work out in this forum thread. Essentially, we’re all sharing a bunch of hotel rooms, and are taking deposits right now. Anybody is invited, so long as you read the comic and don’t mind loosely structured meetups with internet people!

— SuitCase, April 29, 2011

Bittersweet Candy Sale

We discovered that the Bittersweet Candy Bowl candy we bought in a huge batch (200+ packets) about 6 months ago has started to crystallise or whatever hard candy does after a while. What this basically means is that instead of staying a hard lump of sugar, it sort of becomes soft and chewy when you suck on it (that’s what she said.) They still taste nice! Just a different texture! Watermelon and sour apple!

Because we still have a fair few left, and we want to be free to start ordering new stuff (maybe new candy), we want to give it away in bulk to those who are willing to pay shipping!

So here’s the deal - we can’t jam them in a $6 envelope, so we have to pay parcel rates. And in a box, five packets weigh in at just under 500 grams, which fits under the relevant weight threshold for a lower price. So we’ll sell them in packs of five.

(No more! - Jul 2011)

Yeah, that's what it costs, and that’s when we value the candy at $0. But for anyone interested in discount Mike-and-Lucy candy, here’s your chance! You’re basically saving like $20, I guess! And if you want, head to the store and we can throw in other stuff you want to buy. We can refund the shipping cost on orders like that, even if Paypal forces you to pay it initially.

BESIDES CANDY NEWS, email submissions for guest comics are still open until the 8th of May deadline! Thank you to the many people who submitted some already, too!

Also, all might be quiet on the incentive comic front for a little while. We’ll put up a new one-page incentive picture, but if you can keep voting just out of the kindness of your hearts, it’d help! The link is at the top of the page where you guys seem to expect it.

— SuitCase, March 31, 2011

Upcoming Guest Comics & RSS tweaks

ONCE AGAIN I am enlisted to write these news updates. I think I should change it to say SUITCASE’S KORNER.

CURRENT NEWS UPDATE: Veronica has begun to orchestrate a guest comics week/fortnight which will be posted sometime around the end of Pillow Talk (which has now been finalised at 61 pages.) We’re currently working out how it’ll be done but the current thinking is, for a couple of weeks we’ll post an intermission chapter of guest comics only. This will give Vero time to catch up on university assignments around the middle of semester.

If you’re an artist, please consider guest comicking! This is a request for any and all wonderful guest comics. Please submit them with 800px width, preferably one page, as polished and nice as possible. We’ll put up anything that’s great, and if your comic doesn’t make the cut, it can still get an audience on Candybooru. Keep in mind that the people reading this comic are the people reading this comic, so self-indulgent fancharacters and references only you understand are a bad idea for everybody. The deadline is the 8th of May.

As an aside, site news has been integrated into the main RSS feed. We had some complaints that people who follow via RSS didn’t notice the incentive comics going up, so in future we’ll endeavour to post a new news post when another incentive begins. Hope this helps!

P.S. Fellow webcomic artists! We crave your attention. Please consider guest comicking, we’ll love you for it and do our best to send lots of visitors your way! You’re even allowed to make the comic about a self-insert that loves Lucy.

— SuitCase, March 10, 2011

BCI Updates, Incentive Comic, etc!

So we finished January having held onto #3 for most of the month! How wonderful. Right now we’re back at #3, but who knows where we’ll end up. It has brought us a whole bunch of new readers, though, so keep voting!

As a special treat for some of you who may not have followed “Disaster Dominoes” as it was posted, here are the first eight pages so you have a good idea of what has been going on. Read them, vote throughout February to see the thrilling conclusion of this terrible mess, and enjoy!

Also, thanks to everyone who is taking the time to join up as a Bittersweet Club International member—we’re currently 88 strong, but new members are welcome! You can see now some people posting with fancy golden names and privately chattering about the full Disaster Dominoes incentive and a future comic page—so maybe you’re missing out! Join BCI, it’s super cool and we’re kinda counting on it to help with an upcoming bill for Taeshi’s first semester at College of Fine Arts (which she got into, you know!)

— SuitCase, February 2, 2011

Announcing THE PREMIER BCB EXPERIENCE

The hippest club for cool cats the world over. Bittersweet Club International is for readers who want to go a little bit further, gaining access to cool exclusive gifts, special features on the site and early access to comics! There’s a page over on the newly-updated store describing all the features you get by joining.

The first of the three gifts you’ll receive is an exclusive Zombie Kimono Jasmine keychain!

Needless to say, this is meant to be a fun way of recognising those who are able to contribute—some little rewards for a donation, in other words. We love all our readers, but for those of you with a little money to spare and an interest in supporting the comic while getting some cool stuff alongside it, please take a look at the store, or comment in the forum thread about it!

P.S. Thanks for voting BCB to #3 in Top Webcomics! It’s kind of neat, the highest we’ve been. Wondering if it’s worth doing another drive to #1 in February or March.. though the Goblins train seems unstoppable. IT WILL BE DETERMINED LATER.

P.P.S. For those of you who would like a small coloured commission from Taeshi, for an extra $20 you can get a Founding Member club membership… but only for the first 10 orders!

UPDATE EIGHT HOURS LATER

Due to insane demand we have already sold like 13 of the Founding Member memberships, so we're upping the number to 25! If you want a card numbered in the first 25 digits and a special commission, you probably shouldn’t wait too long. Thanks so much for the massive support!

UPDATE EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER

This sale was meant to last a few days, not less than 24 hours! Taeshi says she can handle another 25 drawings for you guys, so a FINAL EXTENSION of the Founding Member offer has been made, to 50. Only 23 left!

UPDATE THREE DAYS LATER

The founding membership offer is over! Thanks so much! For those of you still interested in the card, Jasmine keychain, other features, we're still selling memberships at the regular lower price of course, but with membership numbers of 50+.

— SuitCase, January 15, 2011

Pseudo-Sale & Top Webcomics preparation!

Hello dear readers, I can post here too it seems!

Two things you guys need to know: The Store page is about to be updated with two new things (SADLY NOT THE BOOK, but we’re working on that) and some prices will be going up due to increased costs of certain items (keychains, I’m looking at you.) So for those of you sitting on the fence, you have until the new year to order your stuff at the cheaper prices. As a new years’ bonus, our $30 fan pack orders will include the new item (it’s sticky and peelable!) FOR FREE.

THE OTHER THING: We plan to storm Topwebcomics in January. Can we make #1? We sure hope so, and it’ll take 2000 votes a day to get there. That means you have to help out! Please do. We want you to get started with these old BCB comics for the last few days of December, but starting January 1 there’s a whole new incentive chapter that’s gonna begin. Just vote every day, with every internet connection you’ve got!

Thank you~

— SuitCase, December 28, 2010

Merry Christmas!

Hey, look! New design! New news section! Souppy wanted things to be a bit more organised, I guess, and for us to have a place to talk about pertinent things without cluttering the page comments. I think it looks better, rather than be riddled with doodles and drawings everywhere. I think it's a bit easier to navigate as well, and hey there are some feeds here and there for easy-stalker-usage! Isn't this just the best present for Christmas?

Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone! And happy new year! It's been over a year of consistent updates and I have to thank you guys for all your support! Also stay tuned for 2011, there's gonna be a new incentive comic for Topwebcomics during January.. so you'll have to vote vote vote!

Though voting to see Molly vomiting right now would be pretty sweet

thank you!!!

— Taeshi, December 23, 2010