In Our Lives Together, I will spotlight some of the more interesting examples of shared comic book universes. You know, crossovers that aren't exactly crossovers.

Today we look at the time that the Avengers and Fantastic Four shared Avengers Mansion with each other!

In "Fantastic Four" #278 (by John Byrne and Jerry Ordway), Kristoff (Doom's heir at the time) decided to duplicate one of Doom's old tricks, send the Baxter Building into outer space. This time, though, he had an extra deadly trick up his sleeve...

Naturally, the Fantastic Four manage to get out of that mess, but their building is still destroyed. So in "Fantastic Four" #280 (by Byrne and Ordway), we see that the FF is now living at the Avengers Mansion...

This offered up the chance for the two titles, "Avengers" and "Fantastic Four" to do little tie-ins, like when the Avengers discovered a mysterious cocoon in "Avengers" #263 (by Roger Stern, John Buscema and Tom Palmer)...

and since the cocoon was taken back to Avengers Mansion, we get to see the cocoon open up in "Fantastic Four" #286 (by John Byrne, Chris Claremont and Terry Austin)...

That was the more notable crossover effect, of course. For the most part, though, the crossover was just tiny, character based stuff, like Captain America running into She-Hulk and Wyatt Wingfoot while they're on a date in "Avengers" #259 (by Stern, Buscema and Palmer)...

Or a really cool sequence in "Avengers" #264 (by Stern, Buscema and Palmer) where Hank Pym's old Yellowjacket suit is being slooowly stolen out of Avengers Mansion in the background while it passes by various interesting exchanges between Avengers characters and Fantastic Four characters, with the most prominent one being Sue Richards interacting with brand-new Avenger, Namor...

John Byrne and Roger Stern were close friends and colleagues, so they really made this joint use of continuity shine.

The FF soon moved into their new building, the Four Freedoms Plaza, but their shared living with the Avengers made for some fun background stuff for a while.

If anyone has a suggestion for another piece of interesting shared continuity, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!