My favorite standby is Osamu Tezuka. In the 60s he mostly did children's stuff (most known for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion) but by the 70s he was starting to branch out and make stuff that would genuinely stand alongside classic authors. His best works are the Phoenix manga, Message to Adolf, Ayako, and if you need a series... Blackjack.
Phoenix = each book is kind of a stand-alone story... kinda sorta. The first volume is about the beginning of Japan, but then the second goes into the far future--the end of all life on Earth. The series keeps going back and forth like this. The plan was that the final volume would be about the present day.... but Osamu Tezuka caught a bad case of death and still has not recovered.
Black Jack = a series about... most people would say "the adventures of a master black-market surgeon" but in a lot of cases he's more incidentally present. While some spin-offs like the 1990s anime OVA like to focus more on the "master surgeon" aspect, Tezuka usually didn't play up the power fantasy as much and instead preferred to make some sort of moral or philosophical point.
Message to Adolf = Basically World War II Historical Fiction about two boys who used to be friends but found themselves on opposite ends of the War, and how it affected their lives. There's a lot going on, and its probably one of the only fictional portrayals of Hitler that portrays him as a human being and not a cartoon supervillain.
Ayako = I'm really not sure how to describe this one up without just writing a wikipedia summary.
And that's just among the ones I've
read. Really, this guy has written so much and also done short story collections, that if you just look you'll probably find something you'll enjoy. Two things though: One, his work is often bittersweet if not outright a downer, and two, despite that his art style is paradoxically cartoony. His Astro Boy stuff isn't bad and can be fun if you want something that is more like a "normal" manga.
(I do not recommend Tezuka
anime at all, BTW--they tend to have none of the nuance or depth that make the manga good, and in a lot of cases are radically different from the source anyway. One I
did like was Marine Express, but that one is specifically made for Tez-heads who recognize all his recurring characters--he had a sort of "Animated Actors" thing going on with a lot of his characters).
........................
Outside of that...
my favorite manga of all time is
Ranma 1/2 by Rumiko Takahashi. People who say they hate weeb shit are wrong because Ranma 1/2 exists (and Tezuka, but Tez's stuff has an odd way of feeling "Western" even though its Japanese, so its an extreme outlier).
Ranma is one of those that, when described, sounds complicated... but when you actually read it, isn't hard to follow at all. That's because it has a lot of elements that, on their own, sound like they suggest one genre, but the actual story goes somewhere else. The main character is a martial artist but for the most part, stories don't tend to revolve around him proving he can beat opponents. He's got tons of girls who want to marry him and this
does become a recurring plot point, even though its obvious who he's gonna end up with very early on. Oh, and a lot of people are cursed to transform if they get wet (based on how hot or cold the water is), so....
.... The story treads the line between soap opera, sitcom, wacky shenanigans and serious drama... with a lot of fantasy elements. And sometimes an almost western sense of "Huh, I never thought about it like that" humor.
.... Since I mentioned one manga by Rumiko Takahashi I might as well mention her most famous one:
Inu-Yasha. To be fair... its not a terrible read, but when it first came out (yes I am that old) I found it disappointing, because Takahashi was always wild and creative but here it felt like she was recycling old story ideas (there's a short story called Fire Tripper which is basically proto-Inuyasha).... and then Inuyasha became a standard shonen manga in a lot of ways, when all her previous work had avoided that.
As far as Shonen manga goes though, Inuyasha
is a nice read, my private biases aside.
.... Another favorite from my gal, she also did a short manga series called the Mermaid Saga. Imagine Highlander but more focused on human drama and less on battles. One of the stories got
an actually really good OVA made of it in the early 1990s.
................
Since this ran a little long, my final recommendation of the day is
Detective Conan (called Case Closed here in America). This one is easy to explain: A little kid (who is actually not a little kid--long story) solves murders. I go through phases of loving stuff like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot etc. Murder Mysteries are just an evergreen genre for me. So of course "that, but manga" would appeal to me.
It's not perfect--a lot of the mysteries tend to be on the simple side--there's always only three suspects and after awhile you can tell who the culprit is gonna be--and some people dislike that the recurring "Black Organization" plot has not come to a conclusion yet.
That said.... I have watched the anime up to 600 episodes in. Usually I
avoid anime if they're that long, but Conan has the double-whammy of being fun, being in a genre I like, but also being the kind of show where you can just pop an episode in when you're feeling bored. Something like One Piece I feel like I would take too much of a break and then be unable to tell what's going on because I forgot stuff, but with Conan that is never an issue.
Wow.... I guess the One Truth that Prevailed here is that I'm a massive sperg.
