I've been through the early Iron Man stories from Tales of Suspense on my Iron Man Complete Complete Collection DVD from GIT and have finished the entire run prior to his getting his own series with Iron Man #1.

However, Stan Lee didn't last on the series that long. He began writing Iron Man with his premiere in Tales of Suspense #39 and continued through Tales of Suspense #98. Along the way, Lee created such great Iron Man villains as the Mandarin, the Crimson Dynamo, and Titanium Man. Within the limits of the 11-13 page stories that were reserved for Iron Man's shared magazine with Captain America, Lee put out some great story lines. My personal favorite was the three part arch featuring a battle between Titanium Man and Iron Man from Tales of Suspense 69-71 as well an epic battle with the Sub-mariner.

However Lee's leaving was a bit overdue. In my mind, his run jumped the shark with Tales of Suspense #89, when he had Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan married and no longer working for Stark. At that point, Stark essentially had no supporting cast, no ongoing issues with him "settling down" to the life of a happy playboy. Instead, we were treated to a series of supervillain battles that seemed to be Iron Man saving himself. Each plot would be very familiar. In part 1, Villain attacks Iron Man and we end with, "Will he survive." In the next Issue, Iron Man triumphs only to be confronted with a newly deadly foe in the next issue.

It's understandable that Lee would burn out. The most amazing thing about Lee's career in the 1960s was that he was involved in writing a dazzling array of characters including Spider-man, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Daredevil, Iron Man, the X-men, and Doctor Strange. One of my favorite pieces of Marvel art is from Amazing Spider-man Annual #1 which portrays Lee with all of these characters crawling around him and over him. It's a dizzying array of characters and no one could keep up.

As the 60s came to an end, Lee began to relinquish the writing duties on these titles, sticking the longest with the Amazing Spider-man and the Fantastic Four. As for Iron Man, he gave the character his first five years and four of them were good ones. Give everything else he was writing, no one could really expect more.