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Recently I purchased some Japanese Astro Boy books and to my delight, I discovered that inside, they featured pages from the so-called "lost" manga tale "Ti-tan"! (Or as some of you prefer to say, "Chi-tan"!
Now the story of Ti-tan (whose name is a play-on the Japanese borrow word for titanium and the fact that the character has a very loud and destructive cry) was first featured in the pages of the magazine, "Mighty Atom Club".
The version in the magazine is a little different from the anime version. The synopsis as it appears in the "Mighty Atom Complete Book" is as follows:
Dr. Ochanomizu presents Atom with a new robot baby brother, Ti-tan. When Ti-tan is kidnapped, Atom flies to his rescue, but runs out of energy before he can get to him. However it is Ti-tan, himself who engineers his own escape by use of his super-loud wail.
The following image below is a "Mighty Atom Club" magazine cover which features Ti-tan.

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The following are the first eight pages of the manga story. Unfortunately this is all that appears in the books I bought. Still I think they are still interesting to view. I hope you guys enjoy. (Read from right to left in each row of two, i.e. the top two on the right , then go down to next two, across to the next two at top left, and then down to the last two at bottom left.)

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This is GREAT! And look, without his clothes he looks like a baby Astro Boy.

Another treasure, ASTROBUDDY! Thank you!

You know, I wonder if Dr. Tezuka created Ti-tan to see how people would respond to a "baby" Astro Boy . . . seeing as how they seemed to like Astro as a younger child. And I wonder what their response was. He is ADORABLE!!!

But, yeah, in the anime you can see he doesn't have the "speedo's" painted on. I think they look so cuuuuuute!!!

"AprilSeven" wrote:You know, I wonder if Dr. Tezuka created Ti-tan to see how people would respond to a "baby" Astro Boy . . . seeing as how they seemed to like Astro as a younger child. And I wonder what their response was. He is ADORABLE!!!

But, yeah, in the anime you can see he doesn't have the "speedo's" painted on. I think they look so cuuuuuute!!!

I believe Ti-tan was created as a comic relief character, and as a tribute to the American "Popeye" character "Swee'pea", but Dr. Tezuka may have also had the thought of a younger Atom in mind, as you say, when he created him.
I don't believe the character proved too popular given the fact that his origin story has never been reprinted in its entirety, there is no Ti-tan merchandise and that he is mostly forgotten or overlooked in most discussions of Astro Boy, especially since by the time Ti-tan was introduced in the last season of the 1960s' run, he was barely known outside of Japan and now only spoken of when lists of the minutiae of Atom trivia are made.

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man, i wish i could get a copy of that comic, it looks very funny