In an effort to elevate the comic book version of Iron Man to the atmospheric heights of Robert Downey Jr.’s movie Iron Man, Marvel Comics bet big on the 2015 relaunch of their Invincible Iron Man series. That run is set to end in May, and looking back on everything that writer Brian Michael Bendis and his collaborators brought to the character, I’ve come to the conclusion that this Iron Man run was great… for everyone but Iron Man.

Warning: full spoilers below!

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Over the years since the success of the first Iron Man movie in 2008, comic book Tony Stark has been written to be more cocky and quippy and he was put back in his traditional style of armor, all to make him more like the MCU version, but it didn’t quite do the trick. That’s why Marvel pulled out the big guns: their most prolific writer in Bendis and superstar artist David Marquez. And at first, it worked. The series got off to a great start with its MCU-inspired Tony Stark and was at the top of the sales charts. But after a couple story arcs, it all went off the rails.The culprit here is the Civil War II event. In the first Civil War comic, Iron Man was essentially the villain, so in order to redeem him and affirm that he’s Marvel’s top character, this time around he was the hero who was on the right side of the ideological argument. However, Marvel overcorrected and made him more of a gooey, ineffective saint than the smartass with a heart of gold that everyone loves. He didn’t read like Iron Man anymore.But the even bigger problem was he went down in the final battle, which was published in 2016, and fell into a coma. Iron Man was essentially dead, and because he went out on such a sour note, all of the momentum he had going was lost.Now this is where things get interesting.Even though Tony Stark was gone, Bendis kept the Iron Man franchise going with two different comics featuring two very different characters taking up the mantle. One was Doctor Doom, who supposedly had a change of heart and wanted to make up for his many, many past misdeeds. The other was Riri Williams, a black teenage girl genius with a tragic origin story who was inspired to build her own Iron Man armor and be a hero. These books were quite good and explored and grew the idea of Iron Man in intriguing ways. Riri, now going by Ironheart, especially felt like a breath of fresh air as her story took the high-flying, technological super-fantasy of Iron Man and grounded it in real-world issues in ways you never could with Tony Stark.While the comics were still going strong, they weren’t doing any favors for Tony Stark. In fact, even though he was in a coma, he had downloaded his consciousness into an AI program that acted just like him. At one point, in the Secret Empire event written by Nick Spencer, the AI even got a robot body with a hologram head and was walking around and talking and fighting bad guys just like the normal Tony Stark would, which betrayed the whole ending of Bendis’ Civil War II and was just downright weird.It didn’t come as too much of a surprise when Marvel revealed that, after not being the central Iron Man character for several years, Tony Stark will soon return . Though he’s slated to come back in April’s Invincible Iron Man #599 (the penultimate issue of the Bendis run), regardless of what happens there, the damage has already been done. Death and resurrections are already overdone in comics, but it’s hard to imagine there will be much impact this time considering Tony Stark was a character who was never really gone. This announcement of Tony’s return as Iron Man feels like all of the toys are being put back just how Bendis found them now that his playtime is over.The end result is a promising Iron Man run that got derailed when Iron Man was taken off the board too soon and for too long, leaving other characters to grow the Iron Man franchise without him. There are some excellent elements to this Iron Man run, namely the other characters who carried on his legacy, but at the end of the day, it didn’t achieve what it set out to accomplish: finally giving Tony Stark his due.

I've Got Issues is an ongoing column by Joshua Yehl, IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN