The Face of Marvel: Is Stan Lee Playing Just One Character in All His Cameo Appearances?

Stan Lee, former president and chairman of Marvel Comics, is famous for his Marvel cameos, showing up in most of the movies released by Marvel Studios since 2008's "Iron Man."

What many people didn't know, however, is that Lee started doing cameos long before there were superhero movies.

His likeness would be inserted occasionally by artists inside the pages of Marvel comics which he was overseeing back in the 1960s, usually as a way to poke fun at him.

Talking to Business Insider while promoting Gillette's new line of Avengers-inspired razors, Lee said it was never his intention to pop up in all things Marvel. "The artists back then would draw me in as a joke or just to have fun," Lee told BI. "And I would put some dialogue balloons there and it looked as if I intended it. I didn't try to do cameos in those days."

"Anything that seemed fun and anything that the readers seemed to enjoy we kept doing and those things brought in a lot of fan mail," Lee recalled. "And we weren't doing movies or television, our whole existence depended on comic books, so if you see that something is interesting to the fans you stay with it."

Well, Marvel seemed to have continued the tradition, making Lee the face of the company. Over the many years, Lee, now 92, has appeared in countless cartoons, TV shows and movies.

Lee said he liked his cameo in "Avengers: Age of Ultron" because "it's so funny." He remembers another funny cameo appearance in 2007's "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer" where he played himself but couldn't get into Reed and Susan's wedding because the bouncer didn't believe he really was Stan Lee.

"I like any of them that seem a little bit funny," he added.

There is a theory about all of Lee's cameos—he has been in all five Spider Mans, both Fantastic Fours, two X-Mens, in the "Hulk" and "Daredevil" but never shows up as the same character. The theory posits that Lee has secretly been playing the same character all along—namely Uatu, the Watcher. This means that all the Marvel movies take place in the same universe, even the non-MCU ones.

The Watcher was a character Lee created for the comics in 1963. Uatu observes the goings-on of the universe for billions of years, taking careful note of everything that happens. He and his kind cannot interfere in the affairs of the solar systems they've been assigned to watch, but Uatu sometimes does.

As the Watcher, Lee puts on all sorts of different human personas so he can hang around on the edges of the action, without ever quite diving in himself.

Whether this theory is true or not remains to be seen. See Stan Lee again doing a cameo appearance on "Ant-Man" showing on July 17 this year.