In late October, during Rough Trade Record’s CMJ showcase, a skinny, young man with a mop-top hairdo jumped on stage with a comic book, while half a dozen roadies were busy assembling a huge stage set for Moldy Peaches star Adam Green featuring a full string section. “Hi, I’m the special guest—Jeffrey Lewis,” the man said before beginning a four-minute long history lesson on the birth of Rough Trade records told through song and comic art. After it was over, Lewis stepped off stage and proceeded to watch Green perform.

Lewis, 28 is more than just a fan of the Moldy Peaches, he is also their main cover designer, having illustrated all those crazy line art drawings that grace the record sleeves of many a Peaches record. Thanks to his friendship with Green, Lewis was able to land a record deal with the legendary Rough Trade Records, home to The Smiths and The Libertines. “I was sort of unaware it even happened,” Lewis says humbly. “I was living in Texas for a few months, and while I was there, Adam and Kimya of the Moldy Peaches went to Rough Trade and they passed along a couple of homemade tapes of mine and gave it to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade.”

Soon he received an e-mail asking him to put out a record on the label, and out came “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane and Other Favorites” in 2002, followed by “It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through” in 2003.

The original plan was to have David Lowery of Cracker produce “It’s The Ones Who’ve Cracked,” but plans changed in Spring 2002 after Lewis found out that he was going to be charged $15,000 to get the album done. “That might not be much by industry standards, but having never spent more than $5 making an album seemed too much.” Lewis ended up making the record himself over the course of about a year at his friend’s house. “It was a slow process of procrastination and working on and off for a while.” The result is a lo-fi folk rock record that sounds so raw and pure that one can’t help but feel Lewis’s honesty in every song…

—But wait

Rewind—

Before Lewis ever dreamed of becoming a folk rock star, his first calling was as a comic writer and artist, and that is really where the history of Jeffrey Lewis should begin.

The Comics
From a very young age Lewis aspired to create his own comic book characters and invent his own plots and storylines. “I’ve always drawn comics and I’ve always loved comics,” Lewis says. “I never had a TV in my house when I was a kid until I was 13, so I sort of learned how to read by reading comic books.” The obsessive reading and drawing eventually turned into professional writing and illustrating when Lewis began publishing his first batch of comic books while studying at New York State University at Purchase.

“I don’t have a regular series,” Lewis says. “I have one series in which each book divided into two halves; one half is a fictional story about this guy named Baby Shoes who has legs growing out of his head and he’s addicted to shooting truth serum, and he has these surreal adventures.” The other half of the comic is the autobiographical story of a semester he spent studying in London. Lewis has already published two issues of Baby Shoes and is presently working a third. Another project on the backburner is a collection of one to eight page stories titled “The World Wide Comic Scavenger Hunt.”

“I want to get them published in either magazines or ‘zines or Web sites, and the story will have a note at the end that says, ‘If you want to find the next story in the scavenger hunt, e-mail this person in Germany.’ Theoretically, it will form this chain of stories where someone could pick up one story and chase down the rest by ordering magazines or finding the Web sites.”

If given the chance, Lewis says that he wouldn’t mind working for one of the big league comic book companies, but wouldn’t want that to be the pinnacle of his comic career. “I would certainly do that for some period of time to have the experience of working in that environment, and it probably pays better than underground comics,” Lewis says. “I think it would be really good to have the experience of working in an editor-run environment, where you have an art editor and a story editor, and people who are going to be on you to tell you that a certain panel needs more drama or that a telephone booth I drew in one panel has the wrong details.”

Do you still read comic books?
“I’ll read stuff depending on who’s doing it. I’m a big fan of Dan Clowes and Alan Moore—People who I would check out no matter what they were doing. I would buy their stuff whether they working on something underground and black and white or something in the mainstream industry.”

Lewis is more than just a fan of Alan Moore. While in college Jeffrey spent a good chunk of time researching the comic author and writing up a thick senior Lit thesis on Moore’s comic masterpiece “Watchmen.” Lewis has gone so far as to be invited to lecture on the topic at a graphic novel conference in Belgium. “I would really like to re-edit that whole project and publish it,” Lewis says. “I think that Watchmen is a work of art that hasn’t really received its full credit as far as the techniques Alan Moore invented for it—There’s really nothing else like it.”

Mention that you don’t quite understand Watchmen or find it difficult to read and Lewis jumps to its defense like a rabid music fan. “”What makes that book great is the totally inventive and bizarre story-telling techniques he uses to explain the story. There are just so many details in the panels and illustration and text—The story that’s being told is happening on three levels at once. What’s being said, what’s being shown and… it’s just so hard to get into this briefly. Are you familiar with Joyce’s “Ulysses?”

The Music
It wasn’t until 1997 that Lewis decided to take his passion for music to the next level and began performing for friends. “I started playing some open mics with some songs I had written, and so the music thing is newer then the comics, but it’s really blossomed in a different way.” Now Lewis is balancing a schedule of touring behind the strange little yarns he has spun on his latest record “It’s The Ones Who’ve Cracked That The Light Shines Through.”

The album opens with Back When I Was 4, a sort of autobiographical tale of Lewis as he ages through life, eventually dying at age 100 and something. The song is cheerful at first but slowly turns sad as Lewis loses everything in life, including his pet fish. “It’s obviously autobiographical up to a point.” Lewis admits that the song was mostly stream of conscious and was just meant to be fun.

Another obviously exciting tune is the album’s fastest song If You Shoot The Head You Kill The Ghoul, which is almost a folk punk song. “I almost didn’t put that song on the record, but I am a fan of zombie movies and I already have a bunch of songs that are almost comic book book/scifi/punk songs,” Lewis explains. The song is book-ended by news reports of zombie invasions that sound very familiar. “I originally had a sample from “Night Of The Living Dead” at the beginning, and another bit of dialogue at the end, but Rough Trade was nervous about getting the rights to it, so I took off the sample and recorded my mom saying similar lines into a tape recorder with a typewriter effect in the background.”

What’s the song that you’re the most proud of on the new record?
“I definitely thing Sea Song is one of the best recordings I’ve ever done, because it’s basically just a live recording from London,” Lewis explains. “We were just all in a room with this Indian Tambora, and I had this Casio keyboard that I was stepping on with my foot, and I had a cassette of whale songs that I played on a little tape player. It’s basically just a live recording that came out so nice that I just couldn’t believe it. If I had to listen to a track on the album, I would pick that one.”

Other songs on the record are a little more personal, expounding on his travels through verse, much like he does in his comic books. Lewis says that he doesn’t mind that his music is being shared across the Internet on various file-sharing programs, and feels perfectly comfortable having his songs floating out there in the digital unknown. “I certainly don’t mind it,” Lewis says. “I’m not up in arms about it at all. Most of the music that I own I feel like the artist didn’t get any money out of me, sadly. I buy most of my music on used vinyl or I tape CDs off of people. I think it’s good to get the music out there.

“And really, it comes down to the overpricing of CDs in store,” Lewis explains. “I can go out and make copies of my own album for a dollar a piece and I’m sure record companies that make thousands of copies get them for 50 cents a piece. I think when albums are five bucks in stores then it’s going to be better for everybody.”