The article on the Rolling Stone site about Steve Ditko seems to have snuck out from behind the paywall and is readily available to all. Right now, at least. There is no further need for dozens of you to send me pirate links or copies of it…but thanks to dozens of you.
I'm also getting a lot of mail from folks discussing what I wrote about it. This message is from my longtime friend Paul Levitz, who will be a Special-Type Guest at this year's Comic-Con International and who will be joining me on a couple of panels there. Paul has this to add…
In the old newsstand days, last issues often sold a little better…assumed to be because some newsdealers didn't return copies of a comic until the next issue came out, and the extra display time allowed a few more to sell (conventional wisdom but undocumented or researched as far as I know).
The timing's right for Goodman to have made the decision based on sales. With Amazing Fantasy #15 in June, as a bi-monthly, real sales estimates were likely to have come in August, reliable ones in September-October. Fits your scenario. (It's possible to get some preliminary estimates earlier, but you had to do that by an 'assignment' to the road men, and those were limited opportunities, unlikely to have been wasted on a presumed last issue, and I'm guessing Independent News wasn't being generous with Goodman and doing extra work.)
I'll translate for those of you who are lost: Independent News, which was an arm of DC Comics, was the national distributor not only of DC's product but of Martin Goodman's Marvel line. They put strict limits on how many comics Goodman could publish each month as he had a habit of flooding the marketplace with product, which created problems for DC and other publishers.
Those limits probably made Goodman too quick to cancel a low-selling comic and replace it with something that might do better and I believe he erred a few times — canceling The Incredible Hulk, for example, after just a few issues. But then that's a mistake I think most comic publishers made over and over. In the matter we were discussing, Goodman canceled Amazing Fantasy without even waiting to see any sales figures on Spider-Man — and then those numbers came in…