Detective Conan Review, decent if you like individual stories

Meitantei Conan detective stories are great read if you know how to focus on individual events, and sort of forget the main plot. Personally, I've read Conan for about 20 volumes before individual detective stories began to taste like wood.

 
If you really don't want to read individual plots, but rather want to follow the big plot development, Conan most likely won't be your anime/manga. As has been already mentioned, the plot and character development are moving slowly, and especially character development to may even move backwards several times. Also events do not proceed logically, like when artist wants to tell on an airplane occurring murder mystery, then an airplane occurring murder mystery will be told, even if the characters don't eventually go anywhere.

This can be seen as kind of a good thing, because frankly, at least for me I was not interested in the actual main plot. The detective stories are the most important thing, and when they stay interesting from start to finish and quality does not fluctuate downwards, why not to keep reading? At least in this series there's pretty much re-read value. The only thing in this long saga makes you wonder is that why in the world kid 10 years old is so easily accessible to places to rummage murder scenes and corpses?

Art of Detective Conan can be described as pretty good: you should be aware that it has been going on for over a decade so there's obviously pretty much improvement along the way in this manga. However in this kind of manga the art doesn't play the main part and the pages are pretty often filled with text explaining all the deductions etc.

As for the characters they are pretty likeable: The author has managed to focus on just a small group of people who are doing their detective work and it works just fine for the series. The only part that I really don't like in Detective Conan are the  "kid detective" parts in which Conan is doing detective 'work' with his classmates. It feels like they are directed towards the younger parts of the audience, but since the cases are of course related to murder etc. I find that a little weird thing to do from the author.

As it's been told the whole story aspect of Detective Conan mostly revolves around the individual cases. There is however "main plot" going on in the background and it gets focused slighty in between some arcs and I have to say that it's pretty interesting. It seems though that the author doesn't intend to finish the main story anywhere in the near future. As for the individual cases I have to say that for the most part they have been very interesting. The author has managed to create some good twists and easily most of the cases have been constructed in such a manner that I didn't have any kind of hope of solving them by myself. If that doesn't deserve some praise then I don't know what does. 

In short, Conan is not even intended to be told as main plot of a story, but its main focus has always been and certainly will be the short detective stories