Just more for posterity.

Why Marvel no longer tries to coordinate character appearances in other books and Why guest appearances by Spider-Man and Wolverine don't help sales anymore.

i'd sure like to read a good X-Men story. when do you think they'll start publishing one?

and it would help if the recap page actually recapped in a useful way. most of the time, they themselves are only comprehensible if you already know what's going on. they certainly don't recap things that happened in another book that would explain why character XYZ now has a different costume and altered powers. and i don't see how a footnote box appearing in a collected trade that says "see Uncanny Avengers issue ###" when someone who used to be dead isn't anymore can possibly be bothersome or distracting to the reader. i think it's way more distracting to suddenly see a heretofore dead character appear with zero explanation. i'm going to stop reading and start shooting off emails or messages to my friends asking what they know about it.

Just to play devil's advocate, fnord, sometimes trying to coordinate character appearances in other books wound up causing problems, as you recently found with the FF's whereabouts during the Mansion Siege. (No, I'm not buying that She-Hulk was going to add anything after the and... in Avengers 278.)

Yeah, that's definitely the trade-off. And i understand why they've backed away from attempting tighter "continuity" for that reason.

I will say those problems usually only get noticed by us geeks that get way into the nitty gritty, though (Roger Stern's intentions for his FF and Avengers books would have worked fine if it wasn't for the Comet Man series, but of course i'm working through other examples around the three 1987 Versus books). My preference of course is that they try and occasionally fail and require us to make up some No Prize-y explanations than to be so unrelated to the other books in the line that it sometimes doesn't feel like a cohesive shared universe any more. I love Thor showing up in 1987's X-Men vs. the Avengers and (seemingly!) referencing being under Hela's curse because (even if it doesn't quite fit) it really feels like a singular story about Thor across the various titles. But when i was reading the Marvel NOW Avengers titles, the Thor that was showing up in Uncanny Avengers was completely disconnected from his appearance in Hickman's book.

The other thing Brevoort doesn't mention but i think is relevant and a point in modern Marvel's favor (with regards to "continuity", anyway) is that stories are longer and slower now. So that's why i hold out hope that, while in real time it feels disconnected, when i read the story arcs all at once, with 6-12 issues being the equivalent of 1-3 issues in 1980s time, it might feel more cohesive. The books do eventually reference each other, at least in the broad sense of Spider-Man showing up in his Future Foundation costume or being secretly Dr. Octopus, but it's less immediate. And that gets to Brevoort's "work out their sequence for themselves" comment. So we'll see... But it is definitely resulting in me being less involved with Marvel in realtime.