If only you knew how badly Tony Stark has been shafted over the last ten years, often by the writers of his own magazine.
...I guess it all started with Mike Grell. He had had rough patches before, most infamously with Terry Kavanagh, around the Crossing, but that was long ago and squarely in the Nineties, which, as everybody knows, don't really count.
But Mike Grell... in retrospect, he wasn't even that bad. But at the time, it seemed like the frickin' apocalypse. If only we'd known.
Anyway... after Grell left, we got a fill-in guy, and then John Jackson Miller who wrote quite entertainingly... until he would leave again. His run was followed by a truly abysmal story by Mark Ricketts. We were sad... until we heard who was going to be the new writer... Warren frickin' Ellis!!
Well... he wrote six issues... the famous, game-changing story 'Extremis'... and then he was gone again. But it took... eighteen months.
And after that... 'Civil War'. That was when it really was going to go downhill, that was the blow from which Iron Man would never recover (He didn't). He was set up to play the designated villain role in the event, which involved the heroic community being divided over legislation. Oh, nominally either side was as right, or as wrong, as the other, but Iron Man was universally derided as a fascist. Thanks in no part to a highly tendentious depiction in the comic itself.
And at the end, Captain America was killed, conveniently martyring him, making Iron Man look even worse.
And he just never really came back from that. From that time on, Tony Stark was this snarky, stuck-up shifty guy who thought he was smarter than everybody else and who always was planning stuff in secret, probably planning to take your rights and freedom away in the name of some abstract cause.
Except in his own book, of course. After a laudable effort by the Knaufs, and some fairly solid fill-in work by Gage and Moore, volume 5 was written entirely by one writer, the longest consecutive run any writer has ever had on 'Iron Man'... his name: Matt Fraction.
Matt Fraction is Satan. Imagine your favorite book and superhero being in the hands of a man who hates every character in it and wants them to suffer. That was my life. For four-and-a-half years and sixty-one issues. I literally opened a bottle of champagne over his final issue. Almost everything he wrote for Marvel was subsequently ignored by everybody. A great example of this is the major crossover 'Fear Itself'.
The only writer at Marvel who ratified his stuff even a little bit was Kieron Gillen, and that's because he is a gentleman. He got to write Iron Man after Fraction left; and when Gillen is good, he is really good. But even he petered out, leaving early to go write 'Über' and 'The wicked and the divine'. Despair.
So then Marvel made the final logical step: they simply turned Tony Stark into a villain, for real. That is the premise of the comic 'the Superior Iron Man'. Tony was inverted by a mystical spell during 'Axis', meaning his alignment was basically switched, and he never de-inverted. Iron Man is a supervillain, and he was never restored - because the Marvel Universe was destroyed, less than an hour after Iron Man and Captain America fought to the death in the streets, until a Helicarrier crashed on top of them. As of this writing, Iron Man is missing, presumed dead.
So you can understand I am a little bummed-out on the Iron Man front.