I don't know, what do you say about Dragon Ball? That Akria Toriyama came up with a story, based on Journey to the West, that became the template for a a huge chunk of shonen manga? The cheerful protagonist who loves to eat and fight, who loves a challenge and makes friends wherever he goes has been duplicated or riffed on in so many other series or video games or whatever. The repeated tournament structure, the steady escalation of threats. I mean, Goku starts out having trouble rescuing Bulma from a single pterosaur, and by the end of this stretch of the manga, he's fighting the offspring of a demon who forced the entire world to surrender to him and vowed to destroy a country every year on that day, just for a celebration.
I don't think Toriyama was the first to use those elements, although perhaps using them altogether was a novel idea. But it was the way he did it that seems to have resonated with an entire generation of artists, in Japan and the States.
The series has its issues. Master Roshi is a warning all his own, the archetypical perverted old master, groping girls and trying to get them to flash him. Oolong the shapeshifting pig is the same, although he's at least sort of an antagonist at the start (a pathetic one, but still.) The Mr. Popo character looks like a Sambo caricature or something. So there's things that aren't great, and it's things that could be eliminated at no real cost. The series has plenty of humor without peeping tom shit gone awry, and it wouldn't be that hard to come up with a less offensive design for Mr. Popo.
I've read somewhere the initial World Martial Arts Tournament arc sort of saved the series from being canceled. Which is odd to think of, because up to that point, it had been about hunting the Dragon Balls and running into various semi-comic threats. An evil rabbit that turns people into carrots. A desert bandit who gets social anxiety around pretty girls. Emperor Pilaf and his two beleaguered henchmen. Goku's complete ignorance of almost anything.
And the series still revolves around that for a time. Goku or someone else seeking the Dragon Balls for one reason or another, and Goku getting stronger in the process. The tournaments are really just a way to showcase the improvements in a series of well-illustrated fights. Toriyama knows how to draw for comedy, exaggerated looks when someone arrogant gets shown up. But he also knows how to draw someone taking a punch and make it look like it hurt.
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