Romeu

Carlos Romeu Müller was born in May 1948 in Barcelona, son of Catalan father and French mother. He also had a German grandfather who keeps him from being pro-independence. Destined from the cradle to be a leader in the then powerful Catalan textile industry, he is forced to study business after being expelled from the Escola Pia (where his bad habit of falsifying his fathers’ signature in the student notebooks was known by half the school). With little or no interest in commerce and more inspired by Fine Arts, he practiced many trades (installer of illuminated signs, gas lighters in the old coal boilers, making marker tapes for fueral wreaths, waiter, bus assistant, Romanesque forger for tourists ...) to pay for his passion, books and glasses. Creating paintings, sculptures, jewellery designs, edited prints and realising that Fine Arts was aesthetically rewarding but didn’t pay the bills, he started working as a warehouse manager in an iron and steel company and combined it with his trade studies and working for architects making elevations and models.

He was called up to the ranks where he achieved the first level of fire fighter chief. One day he drew a comic and showed it to a bookseller. The bookseller showed it to an editor who decided to publish it (with no mention of payment at any moment) Luis Vigil was the editor and the magazine New Dimension. The year was 1971. Later he started his collaboration with Fotogramas, then Bocaccio, El Papus, Charlie Mensuel, Mata-ratos, Por favor, Interviú, Play-Boy, El País, and in 1976, El Jueves, in total he has collaborated with over a hundred journals and created three publishers, all short-lived. In 1979 he illustrated the scandalous Libro Rojo del Cole. At the request of Josep Maria Bachs, along with Tom and Perich, he started his cooperation as a writer with programs such as "Tres i l’Astròleg", "Filiprim" and "La Parada” of TV3 and later, as a producer and writer on "Locos por la tele" from RTVE…producing a pile of scripts two meters high.

As a result of his cooperation with the press, more than one hundred and fifty preliminary investigations were opened of which two dozen came to trial and due to his dedication to the television and consequent stress, he suffered a stomach ulcer in 1988 and a stroke in 2002. The first foray into literature took place in 1981 when he published at Planeta, a novel which parodied the styles of the most famous writers of the time (Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Marsé, Jorge Semprún, Pili Franco and Vizcaíno Casas) that would call itself "How to win the Planeta Prize" and at the publisher’s demand became much more neutral: "How to write a best-seller."