QUOTE: Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I know many fans at the time enjoyed that part of Marvel-where it might snow for a couple of panels in Spider-man and he'd say "Weird for it to snow in July" and there'd be an asterisk which would say* *Check out The Mighty Thor # 396 to see which dastarly villain pulled that off-Sneaky Stan

It's true. Though I'd rather have continuity-lite than the hair-pulling complexity of the current DCU crossovers, I loved that bit of spillover from THOR into all the other titles. What was cool was that it was just a fun thing - a tease for THOR and the Marvel Universe as a "real" place, but not a crossover that required the reader pick up any books. But it must've been pretty well planned, because I remember the West Coast Avengers actually devoting several pages to doing some superheroic snow-cleaning off the freeways.

So, yeah, I'd prefer a shared-universe where this kind of stuff happened occasionally, but I'd be willing to give it up if it inevitably led to continuity obsessiveness.

QUOTE: It used to be a neat way to say: this hero has cool powers and his own comic, have you checked it out?

I think that's the key: that these old bits were all fun enticements, not obsessive imperatives.

QUOTE: Well, I just loved it when Dark Phoenix rose and Doc Strange, Spider-Man, other guys all got their alarm bells ringing.

Actually that was explained in the story.   The cops called the Avengers for help, but Beast decided not to tell the Avengers about it.  

QUOTE: This stuff that's going on is important, man!!! When the Avengers clashed with the Defenders, even Dracula sensed the ripples!

Nothing as major as what happened in that X-Men story happened during the Avengers/Defenders storyline. 

"The "shared universe" concept shouldn't go much further than having permission to occassionally use a character from Comic A in Comic B."

But if you're going to have a "shared universe", and you're going to sell that concept to fans, when you don't live up to it that can have negative consequences on reading enjoyment.

I feel that for all it's other possible flaws, Kurt Busiek's looooong "Kang War" storyline in AVENGERS was fatally undercut when the rest of the Marvel Universe simply ignored it.  That was a "big" storyline where one of the main selling points was how "big" it was.  Yet, month after month, the events in AVENGERS never had any affect on any other Marvel title.  I think even some of the Avengers' respective solo titles ignored the Kang War and its aftereffects.

Now, that's not a problem if you just read AVENGERS or just read other Marvel books.  But if you read both AVENGERS and other Marvel books, it was hard to take the Kang War as seriously as it demanded because every other other Marvel book you read would remind you that nothing that happened in AVENGERS really had any lasting significance.

Imagine if the U.S. invades Iran, but the only news outlet that covers the war is ABC's NIGHTLINE.  All other broadcast news programs ignore it, the cable news networks don't cover it and there's no mention of it on the radio or in any newspaper or news magazine.  In the real world (hopefully), people would pay attention to NIGHTLINE and wonder what the heck's going with the rest of the media.  When it happens in a fictional setting, you tend to wonder what the heck's wrong with the one when the many are ignoring it.

Mike

As a kid, I remember buying lots of comics because of those "comics references boxes".

One issue of Spider-Man battling Tarantula had a reference of the last comic Tarantula appeared in.

One issue of Iron Man had the appearance of Justin Hammer with a reference of the last issue he appeared in.

Events in Marvel Team-up were connected with X-Men (Arcade, Living Monolith)

F.