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Although you may recognise the teary-eyed boy in the picture as Astro Boy, in this image he's not.

Astro Boy, the creation of the late great Osamu Tezuka was one of the Tezuka Star System, a set of characters who Tezuka used again and again in different stories playing different roles.

In the story "Son of Hariti" in Black Jack volume 12, Astro is a child whose mother is a kidnapper. She has been kidnapping children and cutting off their fingers to demand a ransom. To deflect attention from herself, the kidnapper has her son kidnapped and when the police question her she plays it dumb.

Going to meet the kidnapper and see her son, her son stabs her with a flick-knife, in a pose that only Astro Boy could, flying at her as if he had jets in his boots. The woman needs an operation on the quiet and goes to Black Jack, the wonder doctor.

Black Jack, realises who she is, and tells her the Buddhist story of Hariti, a goddess who doted on her son and kidnapped human children to feed them to her children. On hearing of this, Buddha was not pleased and took Haritis child.

"Humans suffer the same when you take their children from them" she was told

The mother is put under anaesthetic and Black Jack performs the operation. But in addition to the scarred knifewound, he also operates on her face, giving her a new face.

She is furious, but vows to deal with Black Jack later. Black Jack just laughs and says that she'll thank him soon.

When the lady gets home, the police are waiting to arrest her. She's distraught that her child will discover that she is the kidnapper and the police chief says it's just her tough luck. She then writes this letter, which the Astro Boy character, her son reads, saying she is going away on a business trip.

However, when she is shown on TV, her son doesn't recognise her as her face has been altered. Black Jack is waiting outside the court and when she walks by he says "See me when you come out and I'll give you your old face back"

It wasn't that Tezuka had no imagination and had to reuse characters - far from it - Tezuka was a muscheivious artist and his reuse of characters in different contexts brought a whole dimension to a character from previous association.

Tezuka, a huge fan of Disney, even jokingly made a list of how much they were paid and based them on famous western actors in his time.