Invincible Iron Man #600 is a big deal. Aside from the obvious numeric milestone, it’s also the finale to Brian Bendis’ Iron Man run and his last Marvel comic after a nearly 20-year career at the company. There’s a lot riding on this issue to cap off both this long-running Iron Man saga and a hugely influential Marvel career. In some ways it succeeds, but the biggest takeaway here is that Bendis is leaving just as things are becoming truly interesting for Tony Stark.

There’s a lot for Bendis to wrap up in these pages, what with Tony recently returning to active duty, The Hood attempting a hostile takeover of Stark Enterprises, Riri Williams and Toni Ho being recruited by Leonardo Da Vinci and Tony’s supposedly dead biological father resurfacing. Needless to say, Bendis and his artists are able to give some plot threads more satisfying conclusions than others. Of these, the Jude reveal proves the most unsatisfying. There’s never any real explanation for how the character survived, nor is there a clear sense of what his return means for either Tony or Amanda. If his return was actually going to have story significance, it probably needed to have come sooner than the last page of the penultimate issue of the series.

This issue will likely prove polarizing with readers given how much the script relies on narrative captions courtesy of Tony’s digitized self. While definitely overbearing on some pages, the narration generally works if you consider the Tony A.I. an extension of Bendis himself. The brains behind the series is taking stock of everything he’s built and the need to leave it in the hands of the next generation of caretakers, for better or worse.