Ciclone (which translates to ‘Cyclone’) is a comic book series published by Aguiar & Dias, Lda in Lisbon, Portugal from April 1961 thur till April 1972. Containing an uninterrupted run of 570 issues, the series was published under their trade name, Agência Portuguesa de Revistas (APR), designed to capture a mass market of working-class readers and young collectors during a period of tight economic realities in Portugal.
Aguiar & Dias, Lda. was a pioneering Portuguese commercial firm established in Lisbon on the 11th of February 1948, by partners Mário de Aguiar and Dias. Located on the Rua do Arsenal, the company was initially registered not as a traditional publishing house, but as a commercial agency specializing in the import, commission, and distribution of foreign periodicals. Operating prominently under the public-facing trade name Agência Portuguesa de Revistas (APR), the company rapidly transformed the landscape of mid-century Portuguese popular culture by bridging the gap between international publishing markets and local readers.
The firm achieved monumental success through its flagship comic anthology, O Mundo de Aventuras (The World of Adventures), which debuted on the 18th of August 1949. This iconic magazine became a cornerstone of Portuguese banda desenhada (comic book) history, running for an astonishing 1,841 issues across multiple series before its eventual conclusion in January 1987. Through O Mundo de Aventuras and its various specialized supplements, Aguiar & Dias introduced generations of Portuguese readers to globally renowned comic icons, including sporadic appearances of Lee Falk’s The Phantom, alongside major properties like Tarzan, Mandrake the Magician, and classic Western or adventure serials.
Beyond its flagship anthology, Aguiar & Dias expanded its portfolio significantly to capture diverse segments of the reading market. The company published long-running weekly and monthly titles such as the multi-genre magazine Condor (which spanned from 1972 into the mid-1980s with nearly 700 issues), Colecção Terror, Ciclone, and Aventuras do FBI. To maximize their massive distribution network, which boasted a combined monthly circulation running into the hundreds of thousands during the company’s peak in the 1960s and 1970s, they also diversified into foreign fashion catalogs, romance novels, cinema magazines, and highly popular collectible sticker albums (cadernetas de cromos) detailing Portuguese history and culture.
The legacy of Aguiar & Dias, Lda. remains fundamentally tied to the democratization of visual mass media in 20th-century Portugal. By skillfully navigating domestic distribution logistics and securing licensing agreements for both American syndicate strips and European pulp art, the agency shaped the reading habits of the nation during a restrictive geopolitical era. Although the shifting media landscape and changing consumer tastes ultimately brought an end to their editorial empire in the late 1980s, the company is still revered by historians and physical media collectors as a titan of Portuguese publishing history.
Ciclone was created as a direct weekly companion and competitor to APR’s own highly successful Condor Popular. To keep the magazine accessible to the widest possible audience, the publishers adopted an ultra-cheap comic format, standard 32 pages per issue, printed on inexpensive low-grade newsprint paper in black and white and sepia print. The pocket-sized format comic books measure 10.5cm x 14.5cm, making them easily portable “pocket books” (livrinhos). The first and last editions in the series can be seen below.
To establish a distinct weekly buying routine for collectors, APR deliberately scheduled its releases across the week; while Condor Popular typically hit the newsstands on Saturdays, Ciclone was famously released every Tuesday.
The editorial strategy of Ciclone relied heavily on formatting action, adventure, and Western syndication strips into the tiny pocket layout. Each issue typically squeezed in two short stories or one continuous adventure split into digestible chapters, often with heavy editorial resizing or panel reorganization to fit the dimensions.
- The Wild West Focus: The series leaned heavily into the American Western genre, which was wildly popular in postwar Europe. The very first issue introduced readers to Ciclone Bill (in the story “O Renegado”) and Vance Flanagan, and the series consistently spotlighted “Heróis do Far-West”.
- American Comic Strips: It regularly repackaged classic US newspaper strip adventures. Over its long run, it featured localized translated syndications like John Cullen Murphy’s Big Ben Bolt (translated as Ben Bolt or Zé Sopapo), Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon, Frank Miller’s Barney Baxter, and various serialized detective or FBI pulp thrillers.
Reflecting APR’s broader licensing catalog, the series would occasionally feature back-up material or promotional tie-ins to classic King Features Syndicate characters, including the Phantom (published under his local title of “O Fantasma”) and Mandrake the Magician. The Phantom was featured in three editions in the series, number 406, 428 and 544, all containing Phantom comic strip adventures written by Lee Falk and illustrated by Sy Barry.
Ciclone comic books were printed on highly perishable paper stock and meant to be slipped into a pocket, read on a train, and traded among friends, making them affordable and highly accessible at the time. The series stands as a prime example of how European publishers successfully repackaged global adventure fiction into affordable, localized pop-culture formats.
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