Sometime Stories was Brendan's first published comic work, but was unpaid due to been ripped off by the publishers. Created with friend, Brett Ewins it was published in 1977 and lasted for only one issue.
 

Brendan McCarthy:
"When I look at my earliest efforts, beyond those of the purely imitative doodling of childhood I see a greater purity of intent. The point at which my work started to distill an innate quality was at about the age of 13 years or so when I began drawing 'Skinhead Comics', which were largely done for the amusement of myself and the other hooligans that I hung around with then. As you gather, at that time I was part of the Skinhead youth cult, the first such youth movement I got involved in, essentially because all my mates were getting into it. So when I look back on the Skinhead comics of that time, I see a wealth of material documenting (inadvertently) a whole part of my life - and the life that went on with a whole part of a generation in a deranged suburb of West London, Hanwell.

Anyway, through all this skinhead aggro, I bumped into another skin from a rival gang named Brett Ewins. We subsequently found out we were into similar things, particularly comics, and as the skinhead period began to lose it's attraction, we both used to sit around in various bedrooms with copious amounts of cider, and started trying to out-weird each other in the drawing stakes.

Note: This was in the early 70's when the British Skinheads had yet to become the stormtroopers of Right-wing racist politics, instead ironically they took their roots from Black culture.



"Then came the first Roxy Music album, which really changed everything. Roxy came out at the height of the Yes/Rick Wakeman, ELO, Pink Floyd, 'Pomp Rock' period and was the ultimate antidote to all that hideous bollocks. The first time I saw Ferry and Eno on that album cover I knew it was what I was waiting for all my life. There then followed a period of the most outlandishly tacky glam! Painted blue ears, makeup and lipstick were standard wear at school. Sometime collaborator Garry Rice was known to attend school discos in bikini top and hot pants much to the bafflement of the Rugby-playing majority. What was also nice at that period was the mini-renaissance ot comics with Kaluta's Shadow, Smith's Conan, Wrightson's Swamp Thing and Buckler's Deathlok. In a sea of rubbish, they were worth looking at and briefly rekindled my interest in mainstream comics. It was also the period of drugs, sex, and an unyielding desire to transform oneself into an Icon of extreme and Total eccentricity."

"Out of all that came Sometime Stories by myself and Brett which was drawn in 1976, and released in 1977. Needless to say the publisher ripped us off and we never got paid, and some ulcerous swine ran off with the artwork for number 2. The story of my life! It was a shame it never made it past the first issue. There was that nice feeling of working in a vacuum and knowing that because the only other stuff that was around at the time was Brainstorm comics, which was, to me, the last gasp of the Hippy scene in UK Comix. We felt we were going in a totally new direction. Something that was truly British in flavour, but different in it's attitude. There were some ridiculous concepts in Sometime Stories. I still particularly like The Red Slug, a very Rog 2000 inspired piece by Brett, and also the main villain of the comic, the deranged Crinkum Crankum who was in fact 'Reason For Man's Existence's Brother'. I liked the Gruff as well, with Mr Streetnight and The Royal Blank who were all basic 'Hat' villains along the lines of Ditko's Crimemaster, and The Shadow. I'm still very fond of Brett's creation Felix Adler, which is still in a way my favourite character of his. Finn Mac Cool was based on my continuing interest in most things Irish, seeing as that's where I spent most of my childhood, growing up in the West of Ireland."