Black Jack

He was the hard-boiled surgeon, the protagonist of the "Black Jack" series, who could in a sense be called the personification of the physician Tezuka Osamu. The questions Black Jack was asking, namely "What is the meaning of life?" and "In what does human happiness lie?", represent the themes that underwrite Tezuka Osamu's Manga. In light of this "(when I first started to draw the character), what was the meaning of the scar on his face, to say nothing of his pallor and his costume, his outdated bow tie and cloak? Why, when he demanded such exorbitant fees, did he leave in such a dilapidated old house? I hadn't given any of this any thought at all. There was no meaning attached to any of it."
As Tezuka Osamu says himself (in a postscript to Chapter 18 of "The Complete Works"), there is a certain poignancy in the fact that like the character of Black Jack, he did not have a particularly salubrious upbringing. Even so, like Atom, he was nurtured into a popular character and can thus be said to have had a charmed life as an actor.