Cartoonist brought smiles on the faces of people through his rich work

Pran Kumar Sharma, creator of iconic comic book characters such as Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu, is dead. He was 75, his family said on Wednesday.

Better known as Pran, he was suffering from colon cancer and died at 9.30 pm on Tuesday, his daughter-in-law Jyoti Pran said. “His condition was extremely critical in the last 15-20 days and was undergoing treatment at a hospital in Gurgaon,” she said.

His cremation will take place in Punjabi Bagh at 2.30pm. He is survived by his wife Asha, son Nikhil Pran and daughter Shaily Pran.

“Pran passed away at the Medanta hospital [in Gurgaon]. He had been suffering from cancer of the intestine for the past eight months. He is survived by a son and a daughter,” Gulshan Rai, publisher, Diamond Comics, told PTI. “Pran was making small cartoons for newspapers when I first contacted him in 1981. At that time, there were no Indian comics, it was all reproductions of foreign titles. For the last 35 years, we have been the sole publisher of his cartoons.”

Born in Kasur, near Lahore in Pakistan, in 1938, Pran began his career in 1960 as a cartoonist for the Delhi-based newspaper Milap with comic strip Daabu. In 1969, Pran sketched Chacha Chaudhary for the Hindi magazine Lotpot, which made him famous.