Detective Conan story arcs: The Beginning ("Conan Arc" and introduction)

Detective Conan is an extremely popular detective and crime fiction comic book series created by Gosho Aoyama over at the Shonen Sunday magazine. The series has been going strong for over 20 years by now as it first started in 1994.

The premise of the story is about an intellectual boy named Shinichi Kudo, 17 years old after the first movie, getting beat up by men wearing black suits (well, one of them) whose codenames in their organisation Conan later learns of being Gin and Vodka, and he gets fed a drug that shrinks his body into that of a elementary school boy. After surviving the attack and the heart

Gin is potentially the main villain of the series.

pounding, body burning side effect of the drug, he decides to go back home and has to explain to a good friend of his, inventor Professor Agasa Hakase, that he's in fact Shinichi. Conan decides that he will get his hands on the drug once more and sets his mind on defeating the organization. In order to do this he requires the help of many, many different people and the story begins as he moves in with his childhood crush/friend Ran Mouri and her father Kogoro Mouri who is a private eye drunkard that never gets any calls for work because of Shinichi. Conan will live with the Mouris, awaiting for different cases to come by making Kogoro a popular detective with a cheat in order to every now and then stumble on a case that the "Black Organization" may be a part of.. Conan meets friends in the elementary school he goes to and other different people as the story goes on.

The "Conan arc" takes place between episodes 1 to 128. In this part of the story the core cast of characters are introduced. The "detective boys"; Ayumi, Genta and Mitsuhiko that Conan befriends and joins tend to solve normal clue puzzle cases over the course of the series. The "DB" aren't that important to the story but they allow the author to come up with different, more normal mysteries and they also allow Conan to develop as a character over the course of the first 100 episodes as he turns from a murky person who wants to leave them as quick as possible into someone who cares and thinks "it's not so bad after all."

 Conan gets to meet his biggest rival and best friend, Heiji Hattori. As Shinichi is known as the best detective in East Japan, Heiji is the best in the western parts. This kansai-ben speaking character is a personal favourite of mine. He's as smart as Shinichi is but his biggest flaw is that he's hot-blooded in personality so he can change the way the culprits thought their plans would go or he can also dig himself into a hole and lose his "match" just as well. Heiji tends to bring his childhood friend Kazuha Toyama around with him everywhere, she's kind of like Ran. Once every fall or so there tends to be
a Heiji case in the comic series. His cases are soft-boiled, Agatha Christie-like supernatural murders with the usual "inner circle" cast and case, and a "sealed-off" setting for serial killings to potentially take place in.

We also get introduced to Shinichi's parents, Kudo Yusaku, the what could be the smartest character ever, and a great female character Kudo Yukiko, who plays a bigger role in the later parts of the story.
Another technically rival appears called Kaito Kid. A mysterious phantom thief that steals jewels just to get a peek at the light inside of them once you look through the gems towards the moonlight. The first few Kaito cases are amazingly handled and he serves to bring actually supernatural type of cases to the series as he's kind of superhuman in a sense. Kaito Kid is a tie-in character from another ongoing series of Gosho Aoyama's called "Magic Kaito." Conan isn't interested in mere thieves with his detective pride but Kaito's style is to trick the police and send challenges before the act, so it's a whole other story.
Conan learns during the "Bullet Train" case that the two people who drugged him are from an organization and have the codenames "Gin" and "Vodka." Another codenamed member of the org gets introduced called Tequila and an important character called Miyano Akemi is introduced.

The cases in the first 10 volumes of the series are mostly averagely written in the logical sense but are very much fun to follow because of the characters. Afterwards the author perfects his style and manages to write more compelling short stories as Conan's main pull is in the variety of the types of cases it has. Overarching story during cases, long soft-boiled cases, normal tricks, puzzles, apartment cases with closed room tricks and so on.

Aside from the individual cases I may talk about in greater detail later that's most of the summary for the introduction arc. Next up is the arc that introduces a certain traitor.