High school detective Jimmy Kudo tails two suspicious men, gets struck from behind and is forced to swallow an unknown drug. Instead of killing him, it shrinks his body back to grade school size. He takes the name Conan Edogawa, moves in with a childhood friendโs family, and starts hunting the organisation that did this to him.
That single premise has carried 32 years of serialisation. Gosho Aoyama ran the first chapter in Weekly Shonen Sunday on 2 February 1994, and new chapters are still appearing in September 2026. Shogakukan collects them under the Shonen Sunday Comics imprint, and volume 108 reached shops on 8 April 2026.
The structure explains the longevity. The series runs on two layers: self-contained murder cases fill most of any given volume, while the pursuit of the Black Organisation advances in large steps only every few years. Pick up a random volume and there is a case to solve; stay for a decade and there is a payoff waiting.
The scale is easier to read as numbers. Worldwide circulation of the collected volumes passed 270 million copies as of February 2023. In 2001 the series won the 46th Shogakukan Manga Award in the shonen category.
The television anime began on 8 January 1996 and has been on air ever since, produced by TMS Entertainment. A new theatrical film opens most springs, which is part of why Conan reads as a national fixture in Japan rather than a genre title.
For a new reader the obstacle is length rather than difficulty. You can start at volume one and push forward, or follow one of the fan-maintained lists of Black Organisation chapters that circulate online. Either way, the ambush in the first volume is worth reading before anything else.
