Monthly Halloween
manga magazine in Japan
Monthly Halloween (Japanese: 月刊ハロウィン, Hepburn: Gekkan Halloween) was a Japanese manga magazine published by Asahi Sonorama from 1985 to 1995. The magazine focused on horror shōjo manga (girls' comics), and was the first magazine of its kind in this category. In the 1990s, the magazine launched two sister publications: Nemuki and Honkowa, both of which continued publication after Monthly Halloween folded in 1995.
History
The publishing company Asahi Sonorama began producing magazines publishing shōnen manga (boys' comics) in the early 1980s, such as Gekkan Manga Shōnen and DUO, but found the shōnen market too competitive and pivoted to shōjo manga. During the 1980s, horror films were especially popular in Japan among teenaged girls, while Halloween had recently been introduced in the country as a holiday. In response to these trends, Asahi Sonorama decided to create a shōjo manga magazine dedicated to horror manga, using the holiday as the name for the publication.
Editors at the company contacted Kazuo Umezu, a popular horror manga artist who had previously published works with the company, to participate in the launch of the magazine. The first issue of Monthly Halloween was published on Friday, December 13, 1985 (cover dated as January 1986) as a reference to the Friday the 13th franchise.
Monthly Halloween was the first shōjo magazine dedicated to the horror genre. Its success led to a wave of shōjo horror imitators at other publishing companies, such as Suspiria and Mystery Bonita at Akita Shoten, which were oriented towards suspense manga; and Horror M at Bunkasha, which was oriented towards gory and violent stories.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Monthly Halloween” is manga magazine in Japan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Monthly, Halloween and manga, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “manga magazine in Japan” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11326933. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985, 1995 and 1986.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monthly Halloween” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.