It is unlikely you will ever see Jeffrey Lewis headline a sold-out arena gig – and that suits him just fine.

“I don’t see us getting much bigger, and I don’t see the need to,” he says from his New York home.

Part of it could be Jeffrey’s love of playing small spaces – eschewing Brighton’s larger 500-capacity venues such as Concorde 2 and Komedia in favour of two back- to-back shows in the more intimate confines of the Freebutt.

“It makes for more atmosphere than a giant club where the person in the front row is quite a way away,” he says.

“It’s also nice to play somewhere where we’re all together on stage, rather than being 40ft from the bass and 50ft from the drums.”

Lewis never intended his music career to take off in the way it has.

“In my whole life the one thing I felt like I knew how to do better than anything else was make comic books,” he says.

“It wasn’t my plan in life to end up doing both – music was something I was messing with on the side. I am happy it has developed the way it has though. It’s brought a lot more exposure to my comic books!”

The dual career as creator of five albums and writer of the comic series Fuff has meant a bit of juggling in his life.

“It’s so difficult to work on comic books while I’m on the road,” he says. “I’ve had to cut back on the touring a little bit to make sure I have time for the comics.

“Even so it’s quite a balance – if I spend four weeks touring, that’s four weeks when I’m not getting any art done.”

His two loves have been combined in his live shows, both with the mini-lecture on Alan Moore’s comic masterpiece Watchmen in his last Brighton appearance, and the songs he illustrates with either pages from his art books or images displayed on a digital projector.

His latest album Em Are I, released earlier this year, was arguably his most cohesive and best-produced album to date, which he puts down to the project that went before – a covers album of 12 songs by anarchist punks Crass.

“With the Crass album I learned a lot about the recording process,” he says. “Because they weren’t my own songs, my creative input was in the way I produced and arranged them.

“On Em Are I, I tried to make an album that was representative of us as a band. Before when I was in the studio I wanted to record my songs simply and stripped down in one take.”

With about 30 unreleased songs currently sitting idle, Jeffery is considering putting together another album in his old style – although he is wary of just releasing them on the internet.

“Any song I wrote I used to record and put out on cassette or CD,” he says. “Nowadays, with the internet, I’m not sure what to do with that stuff. There’s material I wouldn’t want people to hear as their first exposure to me.”

Which is not to say he is against the internet as a way of promoting music.

“So many people come to our shows because they saw a video on YouTube,” he says. “People are making videos for us without us having to do anything, which is so much better than having it controlled by MTV or a programming director.”

*3.30pm, £8, and 8pm, SOLD OUT, call Rounder Records, in Brighton Square, on 01273 325440 or Resident, in Kensington Gardens, on 01273 606312