Bleach has the best character design in mainstream shonen and it isn't especially close. Tite Kubo draws like an illustrator who happened to end up in manga - every Soul Reaper has a silhouette you could pick out of a crowd, and every sword becomes something different when released.

The premise is simple enough: a teenager who can see ghosts inherits a Soul Reaper's powers and takes over her job escorting souls and cutting down the monsters that eat them. What builds from that is a whole cosmology of afterlives with its own bureaucracy, prisons and civil wars.

The zanpakuto system is the heart of it. Every blade has a name and a personality, and unlocking its true form requires actually understanding the thing you fight with. It's power scaling as self-knowledge, dressed up in enormous coats.

Ichigo carries the series on permanent bad temper and a refusal to lose, which is a more sustainable engine than it sounds.

This collection covers Ichigo, Zangetsu, Kon and Soul Society iconography. Bankai on your desktop, effectively.