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Ptyk is home
By Alicor Panao

Blame the generation gap but I never knew much about Nonoy Marcelo really, though he drew virtually all of our issue covers in the media outfit where I used to work. I call him up and explain the issue theme and out of our conversation he would produce his signature artwork. All I knew then was that he created Ikabod and his hordes of bubwit for that tabloid which my folks used to read in the 80s.

And there is certainly a lot that has to be known about Severino “Nonoy” Marcelo. He is one of the Philippines’ most accomplished cartoonists, having created characters that have amused and stung a lot of people for nearly four decades. To the generation who grew up with his works, he has become an icon of sorts with a popularity that lies, according to critic Alice Gullermo in one article, “in his anti-establishment stance and seriocomic handling of current issues.” His comic strips by themselves are strong personal statements – making Filipinos laugh back at their problems and focus on essential social questions by their sheer wit and humor.

Comic strips became an important part of journalism than mere staples of weekend newspapers and literary magazines during the repressive days of martial rule. My parents were among the millions who followed Ikabod’s funny antics in the bubwit world of Dagalandia – Marcelo’s take of his own country’s social mirror during the waning days of the dictatorship. But back then, I preferred Mickey over Ikabod and Disneyland over Dagalandia, childhood naiveté obviously inhibited me from seeing the real social picture.
Seeing the real social picture, however, is probably the secret to Nonoy’s talent. He grew up in Malabon beside the drawing board of his uncle, Jose Zabala Santos, one of the pioneers of Filipino comics. Signs of creativity obviously showed up early because he was known to have published his first comic book, Likmuan ng mga Pighati sa Paligid-ligid at age nine. Unfortunately, his precocious irreverence also blossomed too early and a story has it that with less than a year before graduation, the nuns at St. James in his hometown kicked him out over an argument about the creation theory.

As a student of Literature at the Far Eastern University, Marcelo became a campus figure for his quirky comic character of the typical student named Ptyk which appeared in the campus paper The Advocate. Some say that Ptyk is actually Nonoy himself, which, in turn, explains, the comic character’s honest portrayal of campus life. After college, Marcelo took a course in advanced animation in the School for Virtual Arts in New York in 1970. He also became staff artist for the Evergren Review and art director of McGregor & Warner in Washington D.C.

With Ptyk, however, Marcelo earned many pogi points even outside the campus and his popularity caught the attention of Manila Times Publisher Alejandro Roces. Marcelo introduced Tisoy and his dysfunctional gang to the Times reader who quickly welcomed the comic strip. Tisoy, in fact, became such a hit that it became a TV series. It only ceased when the Times closed down with the declaration of Martial Law in 1972. Tisoy even had two full motion pictures on its name. The movie’s first installment, I learned, even had the likes of Christopher De Leon and Jay Ilagan in its powerhouse cast.

Martial Law closed down the Manila Times and silenced a great deal of Philippine society but it did not succeed in repressing Marcelo’s principles. In the waning days of the Marcos regime, Marcelo gave birth to the irreverent tailless mouse, Ikabod bubwit and his miniature rodent-world Dagalandia. But more than just being a venue for shorthand squiggles, the comic strip depicted characters that reflected strange similarities to real-life people. Dagalandia, where Ikabod stays, some critics say, is a microcosm of the Philippines in the current turbulent setting. And true enough, even to this day, Ikabod the bubwit, whenever the comic strip finds space in the local dailies, still goes on portraying the bursts of social tensions from Marcos to Macapagal-Arroyo, through punchlines and tirades of laughter.

In the brief period I had worked with Nonoy, I became acquainted with his style and developed an admiration for his, well, “unique” way of injecting humor into politics. Nonoy, maybe like all other brilliant cartoonists, is a fast and prolific worker. He drew as if he exerted no effort and it shows in the sheer frankness of his drawings. His works, with their articulated gestures and fully rendered backdrops depict people and events with an uncanny likeness to real, oftentimes familiar subjects.

Marcelo reviews life in a manner that, as one Hong Kong art critic remarked in an article “his Filipino intelligence and sensitivity give him an understanding of people and situations, and the courage to stab with his pen anything pretentious, stupid or just downright funny.”

His own brand of social criticism earned him the respect and admiration of people from around the globe. He was the only Asian cited in Time Magazine’s list of mighty pens featuring cartoonists from around the world in 1988. After the first EDSA revolution, he went on to win the Catholic Mass Media Award for print journalism, a distinction usually reserved only to reporters and columnists. He also received the Cultural Center of the Philippines Centennial Artist Award in 1999, the only cartoonists to do so. The CCP had all the reasons for the accolade, “his cartoons represent the temper of the times, chronicling the national experience especially under the dictatorship.”

Indeed, Nonoy is famous; but for members of the staff of that media outfit I used to be with, he was simply Mr. Nonoy – our cool, hip cover designer who, whenever he had his way, would haggle for deadline extensions. He was truly awesome yet he never made us feel intimidated. Never did he make us feel inferior the way college professors would do to a freshie.

Then last month, the sad news caught friends, colleagues and media practitioners by eerie surprise. Nonoy Marcelo left the witty world of cartooning never to return again. Like a divine joke played cruelly upon a hopeless race, this came at a time when national artists and brilliant minds seem to leave us in strange succession. That moment, we felt much more deprived, much more impoverished. We began to realize that we are slowly losing the people who care for our country very deeply.

He was with the revived Manila Times recently, doing the Sunday magazine covers, as well as writing and editing the paper’s four-page Monday pullout section Ptyk. The cartoonist from whose imagination sprang Tisoy and Ikabod, and who, as colleague Joan Orendain recalls, coined such terms as “ermat” and “jeproks,” succumbed from complications of diabetes and heart, liver and prostate problems.

I never knew much about the great Nonoy Marcelo but I am most certain that his was a life lived to the fullest. I am pretty sure that he will bring tons of laughter up there in heaven.

See also: Towards a socially-responsible National Health Science center