(And yes. I did pick this title off of the old segment that previously ran on Hey, Answerman!)
Read vol. 28 yesterday and I'm getting tired of Bleach. The constant introduction of new characters (double digits in this volume) is a real drag on the series. They're in and they're out. Not really having much time to bring anything positive to the plate, but just enough to make it seem so mundane.
Something that the other two big Shonen Jump series are good at is building up the stakes. One Piece starts out with fighting some relative small fry and it keeps on getting more and more epic as it goes on. Never overextending itself. Knowing what works when it comes to providing sympathy for protagonists and hatred for antagonists. Same with Naruto. Bleach just rinses and repeats the same scenario over and over. " Oh, let's infiltrate a foreign world, one that has a bunch of minions to do the head honcho's bidding, to rescue our friend. We'll eventually split up so we can drag it all out even more too!"
And why does Kubo hate drawing background art? He's great at drawing the characters themselves in different action poses and whatnot, but he just sketches a few lines in the background and sends it off to be published. But, that's only a minor annoyance compared to how he handles his panels. He constantly uses one panel to cover up 2/3 of a page. 2 page spreads are a lot more frequent here than I've ever seen in any other manga. A real lack of content. I might say that he's just tired with his creation, but he's been doing this for a while. With that in mind, I just think that he's been unable to grow as an author.
Sad to say that I'm going to keep on reading. I've already invested 28 volumes into this series, so I might as well see how this train ends up crashing and burn.