He wears a suit of power armor -- really an advanced exo-skeleton that gave him tremendous strength and the ability to fly -- that not only kept him alive, but made him a super-hero. Iron Man is one of the founding members of Marvel's super-hero team, The Avengers.
The main cover for Iron Man is that he is the bodyguard/corporate mascot of Tony Stark. To that end, the superhero fought both threats to his company as well as communist opponents and independent villains like the Mandarin. The comic took a rabidly rightwing stance in the early years, which was dramatically softened as the comics readership displayed opposition to the Viet Nam War.
Eventually, Stark's heart condition was discovered by the public and eventually cured with the installation of an artificial heart. However, this was soon replaced with Stark developing a serious problem with alcoholism with seriously impacted on his life and career in two major periods.
The latter was the greater of the two when a ruthless rival, Obadiah Stane, manipulated him emotionally into relapsing and as a result lost his company, became a homeless vagrant and give up his armour for his pilot Jim Rhodes. Eventually, Stark recovered and started a new company, Circuits Maximus, which came under assault from Stane. Finally, Stark defeated Stane in personal combat where his superior skill with his new armour proved superior over Stane's unskilled use of his own varient suit.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump