Oda has been building the world of One Piece since 1997, filling it with hundreds of distinct characters and paying off setups planted decades earlier. The cartooning is loose and funny; the plotting is anything but.
Araki's style has mutated continuously across decades of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, through fashion-plate poses, impossible fights and a colour sense borrowed from runway photography. Few comics have influenced visual culture this broadly.
Ito finds horror in pattern and repetition: a spiral, a hole cut into a mountainside, a face that keeps coming back. His linework is meticulous, which only makes the transformations worse.
Otomo draws cities with an architect's precision and then destroys them. Akira's scale, its crowds and its catastrophic set pieces reshaped what manga and animation were willing to attempt.
Kishimoto's Naruto turned a ninja-village setting into a global franchise, with a fight-design language and a character roster that shaped a generation of shonen manga.
Urasawa builds long-form suspense out of ordinary faces and small gestures, letting dread accumulate across hundreds of pages. Monster and 20th Century Boys demonstrate it most clearly.
Takahashi has produced hit series continuously since the late seventies, sliding between farce, romance and folklore. Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha all became international franchises.
Inoue draws bodies in motion better than almost anyone, whether on the basketball court of Slam Dunk or in the brushwork of Vagabond. Real turns the same attention to wheelchair basketball.
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