I cleaned out some of my older manga recently and decided to check out the stuff that I haven't touched in years, plus the usual newer stuff. As an aside, apparently I'm not a frequent manga buyer anymore so I can't return duplicate opened manga for store credit anymore. 
Yotsuba! and Real: Lumped here together because they're very similar. Yotsuba! is a story about a 6 year old girl named Yotsuba's view on life, and Real is about wheelchair basketball. Now I'm not a fan of excessively epic and action-oriented stuff, but this stuff is seriously unexciting. It makes Ah! My Goddess looks like an action packed movie. The thing is these isn't some random experiment by someone who has never accomplished much. Azuma Kyohito and especially Inoue Takehito are clearly top tier manga authors but they're also the rebels, so instead of taking the sure thing they wanted to explore new stuff. But it's really, really hard to care about why Yotsuba is interested in a rock, or care about anything regarding wheelchair basketball. While Slam Dunk has the highest sales per volume in Japanese history, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who knows about Real. It's not that the content is bad. It's just really hard to care about any of the characters or the story involved because the underyling topic is so underwhelming. Yotsuba is clearly templated after Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh, but she's at best the 2nd leading girl in the story. I'd argue the Killer Cat is more memorable character than she is, and of course she can't compare to Osaka, the queen of forgetfulness.
While I frown upon mainstream manga, you don't have to publish your work in some no name brand with a topic that's doomed to fail to 'stuck it to the Man'. I think something like Slam Dunk 2 where the main character's team now becomes the prohibitive favorite to win it all would have worked perfectly fine. After all, the point of Slam Dunk was that the main character's team were much better than anyone other team to begin with. They just had a hard time getting their best defender (Sakuragi) to buy into the defense concept, and their best passer (Rukawa) to pass the ball instead of throwing up crazy shots. Yotsuba could be about say the childhood of Osaka, Chiyo, and one other character from Azumanga Daioh and that'd give enough spice without being too crazy (a story featuring only Osaka would get predictable after a while).
Tenchi Muyo - I really think whoever wrote/draw/animated this had no idea what the heck they're doing. It's like every 5-6 episodes length of stuff you see the series getting completely rebooted, whether it's the manga or the anime. While you can say they're just parallel universes that happens to feature characters that are named and looked the same, it's hard to ignore some obvious continuity to think of Tenchi Muyo as a bunch of disjointed episodes. It appears there's supposed to be a point to this but no one ever figured out what it was. I thought about buying the newer Tenchi Muyo manga but the blurb on the last volume says something like: "Soandso took form of Tenchi's mother and now the fate of the universe is in Tenchi's hands". I thought the fate of the universe was related to the Light Hawk Wings and the 3 Goddesses, but apparently not. It's not that Tenchi Muyo is bad, but it seems like if all the various incarnations are actually tied together in some kind of coherent way, it may have actually become something pretty good.
Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas - I thought pretty highly of this series until the very end. Besides some obvious direct contradiction to the Saint Seiya canon (only Aries and Libra was supposed to have survived the final battle), Sasha managed to do even less than the original Athena in Saint Seiya. Throughout the final battle she never did anything whatsoever, not even some generic: "BELIEVE IN LOVE!!!!" deal that even a damsel in distress can do. It's almost like the author forgot there was a character named Sasha who was supposed to be this generation's Athena. Also, the final battle in no way actually addressed the underyling premise of the series. You've a series that opened with Hades saying, "This man (Tenma)... was my friend." Yes it's two different authors but since Kuramada owns the rights to Saint Seiya, whatever he says goes. The Lost Canvas is the story of WHY Hades had a friend who, until the retcon, was supposed to be archrival. In Lost Canvas Tenma was known as the Godslayer, so all this time you're wondering how did the Godslayer Tenma became Hades's friend.
And then it turns out he never did. It was because Hades possessed his best friend, Alon, and then Alon repossessed his body back to try to destroy the world, that's why Tenma was Hades's friend. That's like saying Phoenix Ikki is Hades's brother because Hades's possessed his brother. In fact, it's really not clear what is the purpose of Hades in the entire story. It was a good plot twist that the guy you thought was Hades was really Alon (who repossessed his body back way early in the story). Or, as Pandora puts it, the most evil being is not a god of Death, but rather a man. And then at the very end Alon basically says: "Sorry guys I was really possessed by Hades all along, I'm not really the most evil being in the universe. Hades is the bad guy!" And then Hades gets banished in one week.
Ranma 1/2 - This is vintage Rumiko Takahashi work. I really don't think her later works are an improvement (maybe art-wise, but not story). Now you might say there is no story in Ranma 1/2, but there is. If you look at the characters around say volume 30 the ones that matter have grown as a person. They all still fall into obvious stereotypes but it doesn't happen every time. You start with easily stereotypical characters that, at the end, behave basically like real people. Also, for a series where fighting is at most 1/3 of the focus, it's surprisingly rigorous. There's a clear hierachy of who is supposed to be stronger than who, and while the characters move around a lot, the underyling structure is always preserved. Cologne and Happosai are still the strongest martial artists in the story whether it's volume 3 or volume 38, though the gap between them and the rest is closer toward the end (though you'll still see a lot of one-frame wins even that late into the story). I actually find the comedy distracting. The whole usage of comedy is a lot like Akane or Ranma's personality. Because neither of them are good at expressing their feeling, they've their stereotypical violent/insensitive response to avoid romantic situations. Well the story as a whole resorts to slapstick comedy almost as if Takahashi is afraid she can't tell a good story without it, even though she can. Of course, after Ranma 1/2 we have Inuyasha, so maybe Takahashi cannot tell a good story after all, at least not a long one.
Yotsuba! and Real: Lumped here together because they're very similar. Yotsuba! is a story about a 6 year old girl named Yotsuba's view on life, and Real is about wheelchair basketball. Now I'm not a fan of excessively epic and action-oriented stuff, but this stuff is seriously unexciting. It makes Ah! My Goddess looks like an action packed movie. The thing is these isn't some random experiment by someone who has never accomplished much. Azuma Kyohito and especially Inoue Takehito are clearly top tier manga authors but they're also the rebels, so instead of taking the sure thing they wanted to explore new stuff. But it's really, really hard to care about why Yotsuba is interested in a rock, or care about anything regarding wheelchair basketball. While Slam Dunk has the highest sales per volume in Japanese history, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who knows about Real. It's not that the content is bad. It's just really hard to care about any of the characters or the story involved because the underyling topic is so underwhelming. Yotsuba is clearly templated after Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh, but she's at best the 2nd leading girl in the story. I'd argue the Killer Cat is more memorable character than she is, and of course she can't compare to Osaka, the queen of forgetfulness.
While I frown upon mainstream manga, you don't have to publish your work in some no name brand with a topic that's doomed to fail to 'stuck it to the Man'. I think something like Slam Dunk 2 where the main character's team now becomes the prohibitive favorite to win it all would have worked perfectly fine. After all, the point of Slam Dunk was that the main character's team were much better than anyone other team to begin with. They just had a hard time getting their best defender (Sakuragi) to buy into the defense concept, and their best passer (Rukawa) to pass the ball instead of throwing up crazy shots. Yotsuba could be about say the childhood of Osaka, Chiyo, and one other character from Azumanga Daioh and that'd give enough spice without being too crazy (a story featuring only Osaka would get predictable after a while).
Tenchi Muyo - I really think whoever wrote/draw/animated this had no idea what the heck they're doing. It's like every 5-6 episodes length of stuff you see the series getting completely rebooted, whether it's the manga or the anime. While you can say they're just parallel universes that happens to feature characters that are named and looked the same, it's hard to ignore some obvious continuity to think of Tenchi Muyo as a bunch of disjointed episodes. It appears there's supposed to be a point to this but no one ever figured out what it was. I thought about buying the newer Tenchi Muyo manga but the blurb on the last volume says something like: "Soandso took form of Tenchi's mother and now the fate of the universe is in Tenchi's hands". I thought the fate of the universe was related to the Light Hawk Wings and the 3 Goddesses, but apparently not. It's not that Tenchi Muyo is bad, but it seems like if all the various incarnations are actually tied together in some kind of coherent way, it may have actually become something pretty good.
Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas - I thought pretty highly of this series until the very end. Besides some obvious direct contradiction to the Saint Seiya canon (only Aries and Libra was supposed to have survived the final battle), Sasha managed to do even less than the original Athena in Saint Seiya. Throughout the final battle she never did anything whatsoever, not even some generic: "BELIEVE IN LOVE!!!!" deal that even a damsel in distress can do. It's almost like the author forgot there was a character named Sasha who was supposed to be this generation's Athena. Also, the final battle in no way actually addressed the underyling premise of the series. You've a series that opened with Hades saying, "This man (Tenma)... was my friend." Yes it's two different authors but since Kuramada owns the rights to Saint Seiya, whatever he says goes. The Lost Canvas is the story of WHY Hades had a friend who, until the retcon, was supposed to be archrival. In Lost Canvas Tenma was known as the Godslayer, so all this time you're wondering how did the Godslayer Tenma became Hades's friend.
And then it turns out he never did. It was because Hades possessed his best friend, Alon, and then Alon repossessed his body back to try to destroy the world, that's why Tenma was Hades's friend. That's like saying Phoenix Ikki is Hades's brother because Hades's possessed his brother. In fact, it's really not clear what is the purpose of Hades in the entire story. It was a good plot twist that the guy you thought was Hades was really Alon (who repossessed his body back way early in the story). Or, as Pandora puts it, the most evil being is not a god of Death, but rather a man. And then at the very end Alon basically says: "Sorry guys I was really possessed by Hades all along, I'm not really the most evil being in the universe. Hades is the bad guy!" And then Hades gets banished in one week.
Ranma 1/2 - This is vintage Rumiko Takahashi work. I really don't think her later works are an improvement (maybe art-wise, but not story). Now you might say there is no story in Ranma 1/2, but there is. If you look at the characters around say volume 30 the ones that matter have grown as a person. They all still fall into obvious stereotypes but it doesn't happen every time. You start with easily stereotypical characters that, at the end, behave basically like real people. Also, for a series where fighting is at most 1/3 of the focus, it's surprisingly rigorous. There's a clear hierachy of who is supposed to be stronger than who, and while the characters move around a lot, the underyling structure is always preserved. Cologne and Happosai are still the strongest martial artists in the story whether it's volume 3 or volume 38, though the gap between them and the rest is closer toward the end (though you'll still see a lot of one-frame wins even that late into the story). I actually find the comedy distracting. The whole usage of comedy is a lot like Akane or Ranma's personality. Because neither of them are good at expressing their feeling, they've their stereotypical violent/insensitive response to avoid romantic situations. Well the story as a whole resorts to slapstick comedy almost as if Takahashi is afraid she can't tell a good story without it, even though she can. Of course, after Ranma 1/2 we have Inuyasha, so maybe Takahashi cannot tell a good story after all, at least not a long one.
