SEVERINO 'Nonoy' Marcelo liked to keep late hours. His body clock was on New York time. He started working when most everyone else was already preparing for bed and called it quits when most people were just getting up. So when he took on the task of being i magazine's first ever art director in 1995, the rest of us were forced to keep vampire hours. But Nonoy managed to keep us awake — with outrageous jokes and stream-of-consciousness-style perorations on politics, people, and just about everything else.

To tell the truth, it was difficult to keep track of what he was saying. For one, he slurred his speech and swallowed his words, sounding like Marlon Brando would if he grew up in wartime Malabon like Nonoy did. But following Nonoy was doubly difficult because he had such an active and lively mind that his talk typically leaped from thought to thought, strung together by the most tenuous of threads.

Nonoy took pride in being different, which he certainly was. To his mother, a schoolteacher widowed during the war, he was a difficult child with prodigious talent, one who liked to believe that he was unappreciated and misunderstood. Apocryphal though it may be, the story is that the young Nonoy planted rice on the roof of the family home, an act that remained hidden until the roof nearly caved in from the little paddy that had been put on it. Nonoy, however, soon outgrew the narrow confines of his hometown, and became, in his 20s, the toast of more cosmopolitan Manila. His cartoon strip, Tisoy, published in the popular Manila Times was at the cutting edge of the 1960s youth culture, articulating the rebelliousness and raw idealism of his generation.

Nonoy was, above all, an irreverent chronicler of the times. His Ikabod comic strip, with its portrayal of Dagalandia, a world of mice ruled by the despotic cat Bos Myawok, was a metaphor for the Philippines under Marcos. The editorial cartoons he drew for the Manila Chronicle in the years after Marcos's fall, and for Pinoy Times in the months preceding the uprising against Estrada, were clever portrayals of periods rich in drama, irony, and to Nonoy, also comedy.

For i magazine, Nonoy drew portraits of personalities in the news — ranging from gambling lord Bong Pineda, whom he portrayed juggling jueteng balls, to TV personality-turned-senator Loren Legarda, whom he cast, tongue in cheek, as the Filipina wonder woman Darna. As shown in this spread, Nonoy had not only a good hand but a perceptive intelligence.

He was also a voracious reader, trivia collector, and news addict, as anyone who has been to his Quezon City studio - overflowing with newspapers, books, and magazines stacked according to some logic only he could fathom - would attest. He immersed himself in Philippine history and would call friends unexpectedly to argue some fine point about the 19th century. His last major work was a lovingly illustrated cartoon history of the Malabon that he never really left.

Nonoy was generous to a fault. He always had some hanger-on hovering around him, someone he sheltered and fed and somehow made useful. Young cartoonists were drawn to him like a magnet, reveling in his wit and his generosity. In the early days of i, he always had this burly companion around. As far as we could tell, all he did was sleep on the office couch — and snore, loudly. In the wee morning hours while we worked, Nonoy would join him on the couch, and sometimes, they would sleep together arm in arm, snoring in unison.

Strays — human and otherwise — found in him a sympathetic and helpful friend, and maybe also a fellow traveler of sorts, sensing in the cartoonist a restlessness and unsettledness that matched their own. This was somewhat strange because Nonoy, especially in the last years of his life, rarely left his apartment, rarely even left his room, even if he had a vagabond soul.

In the months before he died, his son Dario recounted, Nonoy offered a room to a neighbor who had been evicted from her unit at the U.P. BLISS, the rundown government housing project in Diliman, Quezon City. Soon afterward, the neighbor brought her children to stay with her, and later, her good-for-nothing husband. Finally, even the family dog joined the entourage of strays who had made Nonoy's cluttered apartment their home. Such laidback generosity was typical of Nonoy, who once left his own apartment because he could no longer work there after the woman he was then living with brought along various relatives to stay with her.

Nonoy did things on impulse. He bought a car, and only because the showroom in Cubao where he purchased the vehicle used to be the site of his favorite girlie bar, and he was overcome by nostalgia when he saw the place. The car was a lemon, it was always breaking down, and after a while, Nonoy stopped registering it even if he kept using it anyway.

Nonoy, as those closest to him would say after he died of diabetes and various other ailments on October 22, wove a funny, absurd, and magical world where strange things happened and where even the most gruesome tragedy can be somehow funny. His music idols were Mozart and Mick Jagger, and his own life was marked by many of the excesses of both. He was, in many ways, a reflection of both Pinoy madness and genius.

His magic lives on.

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PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM