Pran Kumar Sharma, born on 15 August 1938 in Kasur, populated Indian comics with characters like Billoo, Pinki, Shrimatiji and Raman. Delhi's Diamond Comics, founded in 1978, turned that cast into the country's largest comics publishing operation.
Pran's training was determinedly self-made. He took a political science MA in Delhi and pursued a five-year fine arts course from the Sir J. J. School of Art as a distance student, planning to qualify as a drawing teacher. In 1960 he began his career as a cartoonist for the Delhi newspaper Milap with a strip called Daabu, at a time when the Indian comics scene ran largely on reprints of The Phantom and Superman.
Fame came through a Hindi magazine and a wise old man, but the empire came later. After his breakthrough character made him a household name via the magazine Lotpot, Pran kept inventing, and his creations found their industrial home at Diamond Comics. The Delhi publisher, founded in 1978 under the Bhartiya Bhandar Pustakalaya banner, grew into India's largest comic book publisher and distributor.
Billoo gave the empire its teenager. The boy and his circle, including Joji, Gabdu and Bajrangi Pahalwan, anchored one of Diamond's most popular lines. Pinki supplied the pre-school mischief, a little girl whose adventures with her grandparents and companions like Champu and Jhapatji ran for decades.
The adult world got its satirists too. Shrimatiji observed middle-class life through a simple housewife, while Raman followed an office worker through the everyday absurdities of salaried existence. Pran's reach crossed languages, with Putti and Raman appearing in the Kannada daily Prajavani and Shrimathi running in the Kannada magazine Sudha.
The state noticed what children already knew. In 1983 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi released Pran's comic Raman: Ham Ek Hain, which promoted national integration. The Limca Book of Records named him among its People of the Year in 1995 for popularising comics in India, and the Indian Institute of Cartoonists gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
He kept teaching until the end. Pran gave cartooning lessons at Pran's Media Institute, run by his son Nikhil, passing on a craft he had industrialised. Suffering from colon cancer, he died in a Gurgaon hospital on 5 August 2014, ten days short of his 76th birthday.
The honours and the business both outlived him. In 2015 he was posthumously awarded the Padma Shri, received by his wife from President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Diamond Comics remains active, its stable of original characters, from Pran's neighbourhood cast to Motu Patlu, still the broadest in Indian comics.
Compiled from published archives and public records.
