Ask Roseville High

For the printed collection, see Ask Roseville High (book).

Ask Roseville High is the in-character Tumblr askblog for Bittersweet Candy Bowl, where readers put questions to the cast and Veronica used watercolours to paint the answers. She ran the blog at askbcb.tumblr.com from October 2011 to December 2016. No new posts have appeared since, but all 351 are still up to read as of 2026.

History

The blog opened on October 20, 2011, with an “Introduction” post showing a group portrait of the cast painted with watercolours. The first answers went up that same day. The authors soon began promoting it on the main site. A February 2012 newspost advertised “Over a hundred Q&A posts you might not have seen yet”, and by March the blog had a link in the comic-page sidebar alongside its sibling blogs, Taeshi Diary and Baggage Claim (covered at Bittersweet Candy Bowl on social media). By October 2012, the authors had given all three blogs new designs and said Ask Roseville High answers would continue “on Saturdays”.

Answers went on pause in October 2013. Readers were told to keep submitting questions in the meantime, and were pointed at the book’s exclusive answers and the new general BCB Tumblr to tide them over. The blog returned in January 2014 with “We’re back!” and the promise “Ask Roseville High will update every Saturday until, like, June or somethin’.” That August, the authors moved the art, photos, giveaways and author questions to the new bittersweetcandybowl.tumblr.com, leaving Ask Roseville High “for responses alone”.

The authors brought the blog back once more in April 2015 after “a visual makeover”, now on a fortnightly schedule, and the accompanying newspost reminded everyone that there were “HUNDREDS OF POSTS DATING BACK TO 2011” to catch up on. For a while afterwards, the update schedule was tied to a Patreon milestone, running weekly while the milestone held and dropping back to fortnightly once it was lost. By February 2016, Oliver said he was “thinking AskBCB over”, since keeping it going put time pressure on Veronica without much marketing value to show for it. The last answer went up on December 3, 2016, with no farewell post to mark it. Posting simply tapered off, from 98 posts in its first year down to 17 in its final one.

That wasn’t quite the last word, though. In 2018 Veronica said she couldn’t “imagine updating it any time soon” with “other Pressing Matters ™ to attend to”, and in 2020 Oliver reassured a concerned reader that the artist was fine, just “very very busy drawing things that are not Ask Roseville High”. In 2019, the authors had also retagged every post “for easy reading” as part of the site’s Buried Treasure rework. And as of March 2026, Veronica calls the blog “one of those things I wish I could do again”, which is why she still lets herself answer the occasional ask with a drawing on the main BCB Tumblr.

Format

Sketches for answers in progress, shared in June 2015.

The site’s store once billed the blog as “A Tumblr askblog featuring the whole cast”, and that’s the whole formula. Each post reproduces the reader’s question in the familiar Tumblr ask box. Beneath it, Veronica painted the character’s reply instead of posting a text answer. Mike, Lucy, Paulo, David, Abbey, Sue, Daisy, Jasmine and Yashy all took turns answering. The replies stay in character throughout, with the occasional out-of-character housekeeping post signed by the authors.

One such post, from December 2011, set out the questions the blog would never answer:

• Questions for Lucy. She was absent from the comic at the time, and as the post put it, “she won’t be in Ask Roseville High either”.
• Anything about fancharacters like Alec McCain or Tess. Veronica later explained that Tess belongs to her original creator, buttart, who ran a Tess askblog of her own.
• The perennial repeats, namely Mike’s “jerkitude” and who Paulo would “pick”.
• Questions aimed at Veronica herself, and anything fishing for chapter spoilers.

Beyond Tumblr

The cover of the printed collection.

The authors collected the blog’s best answers, together with sixty all-new ones, in a printed companion volume, which has a page of its own at Ask Roseville High (book).

The 2.0 update to the Bittersweet Candy Bowl iPhone app added an Ask Roseville High reading section in November 2014, replacing the members’ comics after Apple asked for their removal. In 2015 and 2016, each of the store’s original page packs bundled an original answer painting with the comic pages (see List of current and previous merchandise).

For Guest of Honor, Veronica used a limited-palette digital style she had recently used on the askblog. Oliver’s page-one commentary describes it as “the same style you might have seen at Ask Roseville High lately, but with some refinement”.