KC Sivasankar aka Sankar who created cartoons for popular Indian comics like Chandamama, Vikram-Vetala passed away on Tuesday due to age-related illnesses in Chennai. He was 97 and was the only surviving member of the original Chandamama design team.
Sankar is the artist behind the signature painting of the Vikram and Vetala series, showing the sword-wielding King Vikram carrying the corpse on his shoulder through a cremation ground.
Chandamama, a periodical magazine for children originally in Telugu, was founded by filmmakers B Nagi Reddi and Chakrapani in 1947. The magazine reached far and wide, being published in 13 Indian languages.
The magazine was published as Chandamama in Telugu and as Ambulimama in Tamil. The Kannada edition first appeared two years later, in July 1949, followed by the Hindi version in August 1949. In 1952, the Marathi and Malayalam editions were released as Chandoba and Ambili Ammavan respectively, followed by Gujarati in 1954, and English in 1955. The following years saw multiple renditions of the magazine in multiple languages and, soon, Chandamama gained a pan-India appeal.
In 2007, 60 years after it was first published, the magazine was acquired by Geodesic, a Mumbai-based software services provider company, with an intent to digitise its content. In 2013, Chandamama stopped publishing when the parent company ran into financial troubles following which in 2017, a volunteer-driven effort began to revive and preserve the magazine for future generations.
