The best manga of all time are the series that combine exceptional artwork, durable storytelling, and lasting influence — led by Berserk, One Piece, and Monster. This ranking scores 12 essential titles across craft, story, and endurance, so you can see exactly why each one earned its place rather than taking a list on faith.
How We Ranked the Best Manga of All Time
Most “best manga” lists have a hidden problem: they quietly mix two different kinds of greatness and then rank them against each other as if they were the same thing.
Berserk and Vagabond are among the finest pieces of draftsmanship the medium has produced — you could hang pages from either on a wall. Death Note and Monster are not especially beautiful, but they are plotted with a precision most novelists never reach. Ranking them on one undifferentiated axis produces arguments that go nowhere, because the people arguing are measuring different things.
So we scored each series out of 10 on three axes:
- Craft — artwork, panel construction, visual storytelling
- Story — plotting, characterization, thematic depth
- Endurance — influence on the medium, and whether quality held across the run
Endurance is where most beloved series lose points, and it is the axis casual lists ignore entirely. A manga that is brilliant for 60 chapters and then coasts for 300 is a different achievement from one that stays sharp throughout.
| # | Series | Craft | Story | Endurance | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Berserk | 10 | 9 | 9 | 28 |
| 2 | One Piece | 8 | 9 | 10 | 27 |
| 3 | Monster | 8 | 10 | 9 | 27 |
| 4 | Vagabond | 10 | 9 | 7 | 26 |
| 5 | Fullmetal Alchemist | 8 | 9 | 9 | 26 |
| 6 | Dragon Ball | 8 | 7 | 10 | 25 |
| 7 | Slam Dunk | 9 | 8 | 8 | 25 |
| 8 | Akira | 10 | 7 | 8 | 25 |
| 9 | Vinland Saga | 9 | 9 | 7 | 25 |
| 10 | Death Note | 8 | 9 | 7 | 24 |
| 11 | 20th Century Boys | 8 | 9 | 7 | 24 |
| 12 | Hunter × Hunter | 7 | 9 | 7 | 23 |
Where totals tie, craft breaks the tie — this is a visual medium, and a 10 there is worth more than a 10 in endurance. The write-ups below explain each placement.
1. Berserk
Kentaro Miura’s dark fantasy is the high-water mark for what a comic page can physically contain. The Eclipse sequence alone contains more rendered detail than most series manage across their entire run, and Miura sustained that density for three decades.
What keeps Berserk at number one is that the craft is not decoration. The overwhelming visual density is the theme — Guts is a man being crushed by a world too large and too detailed to fight, and the art makes you feel the weight before the script explains it.
Miura died of an acute aortic dissection in May 2021, leaving the story unfinished after more than 50 million copies had entered circulation. That incompleteness is the only real argument against it, and it is an argument about circumstance rather than quality.
2. One Piece
Eiichiro Oda’s pirate epic holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic series by a single author — more than 416 million copies printed between December 1997 and July 2022, with the series passing 500 million shortly after. For scale, the second best-selling manga series, Doraemon, sits at roughly 350 million.
Sales alone would not earn this spot. What does is the worldbuilding discipline. Oda plants details hundreds of chapters before they pay off, and the payoffs land. Very few long-running serialized works in any medium — comics, television, prose — sustain that kind of long-range plotting for 25+ years without the scaffolding collapsing.
It loses craft points only because Oda’s style prioritizes energy and legibility over rendering. That is a deliberate trade, and the right one for a weekly schedule. For more on its power system, see our guide to how Devil Fruits actually work.
3. Monster
Naoki Urasawa’s medical thriller is the most tightly-plotted manga ever serialized. A surgeon saves a boy’s life and spends 162 chapters discovering what he unleashed.
Monster earns a perfect story score because it does something almost no long thriller manages: every subplot pays off, no character is wasted, and the ending justifies the journey. It is the manga to hand to someone who says comics cannot do literary fiction.
The art is clean and unshowy — Urasawa draws faces better than almost anyone, which matters enormously in a story about identity, but he is not attempting Berserk-level spectacle.
4. Vagabond
Takehiko Inoue’s retelling of Musashi Miyamoto’s life contains the most beautiful brushwork in the medium. Inoue moved from pen to brush partway through, and the shift is visible on the page — ink behaving like water, figures dissolving into negative space.
It ranks fourth rather than first only because of endurance: Vagabond has been on indefinite hiatus since 2015. As with Berserk, you are reading a masterpiece that stops.
5. Fullmetal Alchemist
Hiromu Arakawa’s series is the best-constructed shonen ever made, and it is not particularly close.
The reason is discipline. Arakawa planned the ending, wrote toward it, and finished in 108 chapters without a single arc of filler. Its magic system has rules that are established early and never broken, and the plot’s emotional climax is a direct consequence of the rule stated in chapter one. That is craftsmanship most long-running shonen never even attempts.
6. Dragon Ball
Akira Toriyama’s series is the most influential manga on this list. The structural grammar of modern action manga — the tournament arc, the power-up, the villain who becomes an ally, the escalating threat ladder — is largely Toriyama’s template, inherited by Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, and nearly everything after.
Its story score is the lowest of the top six, and honestly so: characterization is thin and the back half repeats its own beats. But endurance measures influence, and by that measure Dragon Ball is a 10. Toriyama’s clean, readable action staging is still the standard every shonen artist is measured against.
7. Slam Dunk
Inoue’s basketball manga is the best sports comic ever drawn, and its influence on basketball’s popularity in Japan is genuinely difficult to overstate.
What elevates it is the final arc. Inoue renders the Sannoh match with progressively less dialogue until entire pages are silent — pure sequential motion. It is one of the few times a manga has convincingly reproduced the sensation of athletic flow state on paper.
8. Akira
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira changed what Western readers thought comics could look like. The draftsmanship — particularly the architectural destruction — remains unmatched almost forty years on, and its influence runs through cyberpunk in every medium.
The story is more diffuse than its reputation suggests; the back half sprawls. But as a piece of pure visual construction it is a 10, and its historical importance is enormous.
9. Vinland Saga
Makoto Yukimura’s Viking epic performs the hardest trick on this list: it begins as a revenge story and then argues, at length and convincingly, that revenge is worthless. Thorfinn’s arc from vengeance-driven boy to committed pacifist is the most substantial character transformation in modern manga.
The art is superb and the historical texture is meticulous. It sits ninth only because the competition above it is what it is — on most lists it would place comfortably in the top five.
10. Death Note
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata built the most purely addictive manga ever published. The Light-versus-L half is a masterclass in escalating intellectual conflict, with Obata’s high-contrast art turning conversations into action scenes.
It drops on endurance for the obvious reason: the series continues after L’s death, and the second half never recovers the tension. That is a real flaw in a 108-chapter work, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
11. 20th Century Boys
Urasawa’s second entry is his most ambitious: a group of childhood friends discover that the apocalyptic scenario they invented as kids is being executed by someone who knows their game.
The setup is among the best in comics. The resolution is where opinion splits — the mystery of Friend’s identity is stretched past the point where any answer could satisfy. Loses endurance points for exactly that.
12. Hunter × Hunter
Yoshihiro Togashi’s series contains the single best arc in shonen history — Chimera Ant — and one of the most rigorously-designed power systems ever written. Our full guide to Nen covers why it works so well.
It is held back by the thing every fan already knows: Togashi’s health has forced repeated multi-year hiatuses, and the art quality varies dramatically between chapters. Both are outside the author’s control, and both are real factors in reading the work.
Where to Start If You Have Never Read Manga
| If you want… | Start with | Length |
|---|---|---|
| A complete story you can finish | Fullmetal Alchemist | 108 chapters |
| A thriller you cannot put down | Death Note or Monster | 108 / 162 chapters |
| Beautiful art above all | Vagabond or Berserk | Both unfinished |
| A world to live in for years | One Piece | 1,100+ chapters |
| Literary weight | Vinland Saga | Ongoing |
The honest advice: do not start with One Piece unless you already know you like the medium. Start with Fullmetal Alchemist. It is complete, it is 108 chapters, and it demonstrates nearly everything manga does well.
If you want more anime and manga rankings, see our lists of the strongest anime characters of all time and the best anime villains ever written.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best-selling manga of all time?
One Piece, by a wide margin. It holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic series by a single author, with more than 416 million copies printed between 1997 and July 2022 and over 500 million since.
What is considered the greatest manga ever made?
Berserk is the most common answer among longtime readers, primarily for Kentaro Miura’s artwork. One Piece and Monster are the other two titles that consistently appear at the top of serious rankings.
What manga should a beginner read first?
Fullmetal Alchemist. It is complete at 108 chapters, has no filler, and showcases what the medium does best without the multi-year commitment a series like One Piece demands.
Is Berserk finished?
No. Kentaro Miura died in May 2021 of an acute aortic dissection with the series unfinished. It has since continued under his longtime assistant and friend Kouji Mori’s direction, based on the ending Miura had described to him.
Sources: Guinness World Records, Anime News Network, and NPR’s report on Kentaro Miura.
