As told by Cory Vandernet, and affirmed by JB:
As I remember Roger Stern asked John to set down Wolverine's origin which would be hinted at but never printed. And as I recall it went something like this....
Wolverine was born in the Canadian West in the 1920s living a rough and tumble life. His mutant healing factor manifested itself in his teens. When WWII rolled around, Wolverine signed up with the Canadian Army (never being one to back away from a good scrap). Distiguishing himself, he was assigned to The First Special Services Force ('The Devil's Brigade'), a joint US/Canada fighting unit and terrorized the Nazis until War's end. After the war he travelled the world until returning home to Canada getting a job as a ranch-hand. One day during a cattle drive the herd got spooked and Wolverine was thrown from his horse and was trampled by hundreds of cattle.
Recovering in hospital Wolverine found out the hard way that his healing factor did not include his bones. Inside his perfectly healed body was a skeleton crushed almost to powder and the medical science of the 1950s had no way to rebuild him and there he lay for some 20 years, bedridden, becoming borderline psychotic, until one day he was visited by the Canadian Military with an offer. They would replace his skeleton one bone at a time with adamantium ones. After he had healed they would operate again and again until his whole skeleton had been replaced causing Wolverine untold agony. (No fused adamantium to bone here, folks!) Unknown to Wolverine the military had added a little extra feature, the claws.
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My question is - have you ever doodled what Wolverine would have looked like in that bed with powdered bones? I'm trying to visualize it, and I just....can't.