3 ideas
Anant Pai founded the series after noticing that Indian children could answer quiz questions about Greek mythology but not about their own epics. The series treats the picture-story format as a way to rebuild a lost chain of transmission. Serialized, cheap, visual retellings can do the work that grandparents' oral storytelling once did for an urbanizing, English-educated generation.
A comic series that reaches millions of children can shape which versions of a myth feel standard, and its choices about what to adapt and what to leave out carry that weight. The series is not uniform in this: in Rama's Ring it collects alternate epic traditions alongside the familiar tellings.
The illustrations tend to draw heroes, saints and gods fair and villains, demons and tribal antagonists dark, a colour pattern that carries moral meaning without anyone stating it. The pattern is not absolute: blue-skinned gods and a fair-skinned Ravana cut across it.