I had this conversation with many a friend. It seems that a lot of people fail to see the distinction in how Urasawa decides to construct the (sometimes excessively) over-complicated structure of his work. The fact is that the man is, at heart, a postmodernist: he cares less about traditional tropes such as character development and is rather much more interested in exploring various point of views of a single event, relating the events of his fiction to the real world and inciting the reader to form his own opinion on a subject, a story or a person. I personally love it, being the rive-gauche comp lit post-grad that I am; but I see how it might not be for everyone. ESPECIALLY because the man takes his sweet time in developing plot points. I’d say Monster is by far his most “standardized” work, as in that it’s quite understandable to see the evolution of the MC while keeping the eyes on the plot. But things like Billy Bat or 20th Century Boys, imho, pushed the manga medium to a whole another level that we’re starting to see as vibrantly influent and foretolding just now with some of the more high-brow stuff made by people like Inio Asano, who are more interested in atypical structures and influences external to the classical manga world.