Bittersweet Candy Bowl

Bittersweet Candy Bowl (usually just “BCB”) is a webcomic about love, cats and high school drama. Veronica Vera writes and draws it, and Oliver Bareham edits and does the business stuff for it. The cast are teenagers drawn as cats and dogs, and the story runs on their crushes, friendships and fallings-out at Roseville High School. The authors have pitched it as a comic about “love, friendship and broken hearts”. At the centre of it are Mike and Lucy, friends since childhood who want different things from one another. Lucy’s feelings for Mike run well past friendship. Mike is already taken, by a girlfriend called Sandy who moved away years ago and keeps breaking her promises to come back and visit. Their classmates pair off, fall out and start over around them, and the comic has followed the whole group from middle school into high school.

The comic has been free to read online since 2006. As of 2026, it updates three pages a week. Over the years, Veronica and Oliver have also built a small publishing operation around it, with print collections, a paying members’ club and a store full of merchandise.

History

Mike, Lucy, Daisy and Paulo, as drawn for the cast section of the site’s About page.

Mike and Lucy are older than the comic. Veronica has been drawing since she was about five, and the two cats came not long after: Mike and Sue at six, Lucy a year or two later. Their first job was standing in for her. She drew what she calls “glorified ‘diary comics’” about her own day, with Mike or Lucy in her place. If a classmate was mean to her, Lucy hit them. If a teacher annoyed her, the cats rolled their eyes at an exaggerated version of the teacher. When she liked something on television, she had them act the episode out, which was how she recorded shows before she had a VHS recorder. Standalone arcs followed, ones with nothing to do with her day. Mike got appendicitis. He was also, on a separate occasion, shot. Then Veronica hit puberty, decided the two cats should kiss, and made Lucy a magical girl.

Mike and Lucy made their public debut on May 3, 2006, when Veronica started posting the comic to deviantART. She was still drawing it as a hobby. By mid-2008, a companion website was online. It introduced itself as “your source for extended information about my comic in a more typical webcomic form” and updated “every week or two”. The authors themselves give 2009 as the year BCB properly launched as a regularly updating webcomic on a full-fledged website.

Veronica and Oliver took BCB into print with Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume One in 2011. That same year, they announced Supanova Sydney as the comic’s first convention appearance. The following year’s Kickstarter for Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Starting Over set the pattern for the books that came after, most of which were crowdfunded the same way.

In 2013 the authors moved from Australia to the USA, and briefly bumped the comic up to five updates a week. The free Bittersweet Candy Bowl iPhone app came out the same year. A Patreon followed in June 2015, and the Bittersweet Candy Bowl Discord server opened its doors in 2017.

Between 2020 and 2022, the authors went back to the start, remastering the comic’s first six years for Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Omnibus 1. The redrawn chapters eventually replaced the originals in the site archive, and a remastered run launched on Webtoon alongside them.

The comic turned twenty on May 3, 2026, in the same month the authors moved back to Australia. They had announced both back in March.

Format and production

As of 2026, new pages go up at 1 PM EST every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a schedule the comic has wandered away from and come back to more than once over the years. Behind the scenes, making a page is a two-person job. Veronica writes loose scripts on her phone, thumbnails each chapter in a notebook, and sketches the pages out in Photoshop on a Cintiq. Oliver then edits the sketches, Veronica inks, colours and shades them, and Oliver finishes everything off with halftones. All told, a page takes about four hours, and the pair like to keep a buffer between themselves and the deadline, one that has run anywhere from 5 to 80 pages deep.

The art style has been left to drift on purpose. The authors say it was inconsistent from the earliest days, so they just ran with it, and it “will keep changing until the end”. They do know where the story is going and how it will end. Asked when that ending might arrive, their answer is “It’s hard to say, but we’re getting there, aren’t we?”

Website and community

A banner advertisement for the comic.

The comic’s home is bittersweetcandybowl.com, which Oliver has been designing and redesigning since the first version of it went up in 2008. Beyond the main site, there are plenty of official channels:

• Bittersweet Candy Bowl on Webtoon hosts the remastered run of the early comic.
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl on Patreon gets patrons the next page a little early, plus behind-the-scenes material.
• The Bittersweet Candy Bowl Discord server is the official chat.
• Weekly Roundup is the email newsletter.
• Ask Roseville High is the long-running askblog.
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl on social media covers everything from Bluesky to TikTok.
• Translation projects collect the comic in other languages.

Books and merchandise

The cover of Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume One, the comic’s first print collection (2011).

By 2024, BCB had been collected into seven numbered print volumes plus the remastered Omnibus. List of books lists every book. The store has carried plenty beyond books over the years, including plush toys, figurines and the Upstage card game, all catalogued at List of current and previous merchandise.

Bittersweet Club International

Bittersweet Club International is the comic’s members’ club. Exclusive side comics have appeared there since 2010, and as of 2026 members had more than 800 bonus pages to read, along with members-only features on the main site. List of Bittersweet Club International chapters catalogues what’s inside.

Trivia

• The title was suggested by the authors’ friend Lily, who also created the character Tess. Per the FAQ, “It’s about the intermingling of personalities in the comic! Kind of.”
• Before it had a title, Veronica called the comic “cat comics”, “my silly cat comic” or “stupid cat comics”. The 2008 website itself introduced BCB as her “stupid cat comics”.
• The authors’ company, Lovely Sunny, LLC, takes its name from a radio announcer’s line in Simple Pleasures. Oliver notes they “wanted a nice name that wasn’t necessarily bound to Bittersweet Candy Bowl”, so future projects wouldn’t be tied to the comic.