At Conrad Roset's house, culture has always been important. His mother, a literature teacher, transmitted to him the value of reading. She says that, due to a generational issue, “we have found narratives in other spaces, such as video games, manga, comics; Beyond the format, reading is super healthy.” He does it as a routine, a manga every night. Meanwhile, next door, the illustrator and graphic designer Maria Diamantes reads chapters of Harry Potter to her son Guim; They go for The Prisoner of Azkaban. Guim is six years old and has a library almost bigger than his, full of children's stories.
They barely watch series anymore. In fact, Roset doesn't even check social media (she has 275,000 followers on Instagram, more than 50,000 on X). He would get stuck with the reels and lose two or three hours a day that he prefers to dedicate to other things. He even bought a “dumb” phone with which he can only call, use email, consult Google Maps and write SMS. “It was to detoxify me from always having something on me that takes up your time in an extreme way.” It didn't work, but he only has eight apps on his iPhone. This way he can read when he goes or returns by train to Terrassa, where he has been living for a few months in a house designed as they wanted, with a lot of storage. The first thing he did was a sketch to organize his library, divided into two rooms.
One is the “ultimate room” that he had always dreamed of, with a sofa in front of the console screen, surround sound like in the cinema and a white shelf dedicated to his “vices”: manga and video games. Here are the forty DVDs that his friend Geoffrey Cowper – director, among other things, of some Berlin episodes – gave him for his fortieth birthday. He likes independent, author video games. Physically, because he appreciates the object. The same thing happens to him with books. There are some about the creation process, with sketches, “I suppose in literature they would be equivalent to notebooks for writing a novel.” His own notebooks are in a separate room; In them he took notes and drew up stories for Gris, the first video game he created from Nomada Studio, founded with Adrián Cuevas and Roger Mendoza. He also saves the Neva ones, which will be out this year. He wanted to contribute his bit to this industry with atypical games, very artistic, non-aggressive, in which you can't die, drawn like watercolors.
From the Supertrés generation, Roset began to draw thanks to Bola de drac; It reproduced images of Son Goku and company. She has worked in advertising, for the publishing world, has illustrated children's books, and has had exhibitions. She frequents La Central, Laie, Finestres and Norma. In Terrassa she usually goes to Nikochan and talks to the bookseller about her passions. The other part of the library is across the hall, in the studio, more focused on illustration, art – Rothko, Kandinsky, Miró, Banksy; some he has devoured, like those by Egon Schiele, which he loves, European comics and graphic novels: Maus, by Art Spiegelman; Night Scream, by Borja González, “a crack.” Leaning on the wall, a large painting that Roset made four hands with his friend Guim Tió; They have known each other since the first day in Fine Arts.
In the hallway that connects both spaces, they will place the novel on a shelf that has yet to be assembled. The first book that marked him was The Neverending Story; She was about eleven years old. Then Tolkien would arrive. Later, dystopian literature, Fahrenheit 451 and a lot of Orwell. He went through a time when he only read some science fiction. And as an adult he has returned to the “geek world.” He likes the customs of Taiyô Matsumoto, Sunn and Tokyo every day, “the drawing is incredible, the artistic level is extraordinary.” He also has classics like Adolf or Astroboy, by Osamu Tezuka. He loves The Midnight Cantina by Yaro Abe. He now he is with The Sword of the Immortal, by Hiroaki Samura. “In the end it's about reading, it doesn't matter in what format.”
