Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) with higher population diversity have been extensively presented in literature studies and shown great potential in the approximate Pareto front (PF). Especially, in the recent development of MOEAs, the reference line method is increasingly favored due to its diversity enhancement nature and auxiliary selection mechanism based on the uniformly distributed reference line. However, the existing reference line method ignores the nadir point and consequently causes the Pareto incompatibility problem, which makes the algorithm convergence worse. To address this issue, a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on the adaptive cross-reference line method, called MOEA-CRL, is proposed under the framework of the indicator-based MOEAs. Based on the dominant penalty distance (DPD) indicator, the cross-reference line method can not only solve the Pareto incompatibility problem but also enhance the population diversity on the convex PF and improve the performances of MOEA-CRL for irregular PF. In addition, the MOEA-CRL adjusts the distribution of the cross-reference lines directly defined by the DPD indicator according to the contributing solutions. Therefore, the adaptation of cross-reference lines will not be affected by the population size and the uniform distribution of cross-reference lines can be maintained. The MOEA-CRL is examined and compared with other MOEAs on several benchmark problems. The experimental results show that the MOEA-CRL is superior to several advanced MOEAs, especially on the convex PF. The MOEA-CRL exhibits the flexibility in population size setting and the great versatility in various multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) and many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs).