I like anime and manga but I understand why many don't.
First off anime takes the comic strips (manga) and stretches it out, often for the worse. English translations are notoriously bad with censoring and poor voice actor choices.
Secondly Anime/Manga is known for being quirky, many series are tooo strange. Even some of the ones that are cool at points have 40-60% boring content.
For that reason most often the comics are better than the tv shows, you can skip around. Reading a wall of text takes less time than listening to it with pauses for dramatic effect.
Anyways.
DeathNote is the Anime/Manga that I think a newcomer would enjoy the most. It's not too long, 12 volumes as opposed to 60+ of some other series. The whole show is about 30 episodes I believe.
It's about a teenager who finds a notebook that lets him kill and manipulate people. He decides to become God and 'rid the world of evil'. The plot evolves into a spy vs spy narrative. It's full of suspense, nice series.
Zoids Don't remember much of this one, but they have cool giant-robot-dog-things.
Gundam Giant robot armor suits.
Yu-Gi-Oh Originally about a kid who solves an ancient puzzle found in an Egyptian pyramid and becomes possessed by a 2000 year old pharoah, Atem. (Named after the Egyptian God Atum)
In the series that didn't get released in America, the pharoah goes around playing 'shadow games'. He sets people on fire, makes them go crazy, and other kinds of cool things.
After a popular weekly segment involving trading cards, the plot of the show took a turn towards what people know now. While the show is full of corny dialogue and stupid plots the art of select cards is cool. There's tons of references to mythology. Horus, Ra, Osiris, Anubis, ba, ka, and more.
One Piece Pirates. There's a big treasure. They go to find it. There's a badass dude called Zoro who fights with three swords, hodling one in his mouth for some reason.
DragonBall Over the top buff dudes fighting aliens and stuff. It's an alright series but it's a prime example of the "I could skip 60% of this" syndrome. I think it has well over 100 volumes.
Naruto It's an alright series about ninjas. The art is pretty cool here but it's similar to dragonball in how "I could skip 60% of this". My favorite here is shikimaru and garra. Shiki fights by controlling shadows. Garaa controls sand.
Yu-Yu-Hakisho Is about a teenager who saves a kid from getting hit by a car but loses his life. Afterwords he becomes a "spirit detective" and goes to hell. He travels down river styx, fights demons, and closes a portal linking hell and earth.
Those are the series that stand out in my mind. If you didn't know anything about anime, you know a little bit now. I would never sit down and watch any of these shows now but the art-form is something worth taking a glimpse at if you like this kind of thing but never paid attention to Anime for some reason. The 'abridged' series on youtube are kind-of funny and condense 60 minutes of real-show into ~10 minutes.
Oh, and there's this dude who
fights with his nosehair.
