Alfred Harvey was a sharp businessman. The answer to how he could afford to produce a 100 page pocket-size comic book and make a profit probably isn't obvious unless you are actually looking at the physical product, and comparing it to a standard-sized golden age comic book.
The pocket-sized comics produced by Harvey were half the physical size of a standard comic book, but look closely at the pages as printed. The word balloons and lettering aren't half the size, as they'd look if you took a normal page of comic book art and mechanically reduced it in size by 50%. The pages as printed are half-sized, and have fewer story panels per page (remembering that in the early 1940s, it wasn't uncommon for a standard-sized comic page to contain anywhere from 9 to 12 panels), and the size of the word balloons and lettering as printed compares about equally to that of a standard-sized comic book page.
If you think about it, Alfred Harvey wasn't paying for 100 pages of comic artwork. He was paying for 50 pages of art boards that had been turned on their sides and bisected vertically with a gutter in the middle. The artist would then compose a "left-hand page" on one side, and a "right-hand page" on the other side of the art board, and art would then be mechanically reduced by the same percentage that it always was when printing comic books.
Regular golden age comics were 64 pages plus covers, while Harvey's pocket-sized comics were only 50 pages plus covers, trimmed on all four sides, stapled in the center, and folded in half. Pocket comics still sold for 10 cents, and appeared to give readers a better value of 100 pages versus only 64 for standard comics. BUT in reality -- Harvey was paying for 14 pages fewer of art AND of paper!!
Whether the story is apocryphal or not, Harvey failed to account for pocket comics' ease of pilferage... What he saw as a selling point -- "Fits conveniently in your pocket!" -- was just an invitation to theft. The reason I say the supposed explanation given for Harvey's pocket comics failing is suspect, is that the pilferage factor didn't seem to apply when it came to the huge success of Archie Comics' digests from the 1970s onward. Or maybe it was just different times and/or a different audience, and Archie readers weren't the type to shoplift.
Link to the book:
Speed Comics 16
