I gotta chime in here on a couple notes....

I actually like the idea of the natural claws. I don't see any real reason why he SHOULDN'T have natural claws. It makes a bit of sense, since he has other animalistic features. With the exception of the one sceen where JB drew his skeleton having the mechanical parts in an (alternate?) future death sceen, there is nothing really contradicted by that. For years everyone TALKED about his claws being implanted, but we never SAW them being implanted. They talked about it that way because they were starting from a misconception. I really don't see that as being that big of a deal.

The Annual where Wolverine regenerates a new body from the single drop of blood. No problem there either. If somethign similar had happened when Captain America or Captain Marvel was fighting the Red Skull or Thanos, got mortally wounded, fell up against the Cosmic Cube and got a new body formed and kept fighting, would there be the same problem?  I really don't think that it is accurate to consider this to be a deus ex machina kind of situation since it seems to me that it was written out with that kind of sceen in mind. If they showed Wolverine die at the end of that story, and then a year later brought him back using that as the excuse for him being alive, then I would line up with everyone else calling foul, but I think that the story as written was just fine.

As far as his history goes, I would certainly have preferred if they had left it very undefined and mysterious. Now it is loosely defined and confusing. From here they have two choices. They can either keep going like this or they can lay it all out in the open and give a much clearer and more detailed history of him. I can think of about half a dozen stories of Logan's pre X-Men days off the top of my head including his time in Japan, D-Day, WWII in the Pacific, cold war adventures with Ben Grimm and Carol Danvers, the Weapon X precedures, various alluded to meetings with Nick Fury, all sorts of stuff with the rest of the Weapon X team, Department H. All of this is without any of the Origen story coming into mention. Iron all of that out with a more or less complete history that is solid enough so that new writers have less ambiguity to fall back on and "invent" background stuff, so that they have to focus on moving forward.

Thus, for example, Wolverine survives being punched into orbit because of his healing factor as established. But if the same story had opened with the mystic M'Krap Comet being seen drifting lazily thru space and then (lucky really) happening by just in time to give Logan's healing factor a boost that allows him to survive being punched into orbit, it's deus ex machina time.

But Wolverine bleeds all the time.  Any explanation why these @#$%'s don't think there's thousands of Wolverines running around, if his healing factor creates new bodies from a single drop?
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Hey!  Don't give them any ideas!  :)

Wolverine doesn't have the INHERENT ability to regenerate from a drop of blood.  Here's the relevent text:

A few thoughts:

1. Gorgeous art
2. Too much kissing!  Horde kisses Storm (to show how haughty he is, I guess), Storm kisses Wolverine (uh, why?), Wolverine kisses Mariko/Yukio, Rogue virtually kisses herself...
3. Longshot.  Worst X-Man ever.
4. I think my biggest problem was I just don't like my X-Men too cosmic.  I know it's not THAT much of a stretch for them: the Z'nox, The Stranger (only at that story's end, but still), and even some of my favorites included cosmic elements (Phoenix, The Broodworld).  But it's not as easy a fit for me as a knock-down drag-out in the city streets.

QUOTE: Too much kissing!  Horde kisses Storm (to show how haughty he is, I guess), Storm kisses Wolverine (uh, why?), Wolverine kisses Mariko/Yukio, Rogue virtually kisses herslef...

And this is wrong why??? :)

I'm a huge fan of Claremont's run but the annuals are mostly worth skipping even the Art Adams ones. Annuals 7, 8 & 11 are particularly bad imo.

I guess I wasn't big on kissing the first time I read this.

Probably jealous.

I've said too much.

The problem for me is that I really liked Wolverine, and all this nonsense about his healing factor killed the character for me! I remember the days when it took him a couple of hours to recover from a stab wound...

Same thing with the Hulk. Ever since Peter David had him regenerate his entire skin in like 3 seconds, it's a dead character for me! How can you beat him then? Only inventing new Deus Ex Machinas and playing us for fools...