As recent years have proven, there are many different ways to break into Marvel. You can get discovered doing creator-owned comics, you can write for a TV show, and, if you can swing it, it doesn’t hurt to be the WWE Champion.
CM Punk, the current WWE champ and a proud comic book fan — here he is being interviewed by Marvel.com and comparing himself to Dr. Doom — was pulled into a conversation on Twitter Wednesday that started when Scott Ziloko (whose comics you can check out here) and John M. Coker (art director for Grayhaven Comics, whom we wrote about here) asked noted pro wrestling enthusiast/acclaimed illustrator Jill Thompson (who designed current WWE World Heavyweight Champion Daniel Bryan’s ring gear) if she’d be up for collaborating on a story written by Punk. Thompson was indeed up for it, as was Punk, leading Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso to tweet the (possibly) magical words, “let’s make it happen.”
Of course, a few tweets, as positive as they seem, are still a long way from a comic book being in readers’ hands, but a Punk/Thompson/WWE collaboration looks to be definitely possible at this point. Talk gravitated to the story focusing on The Thing, due to Punk exclaiming Ben Grimm’s catchphrase “It’s clobberin’ time” as a constant part of his ring entrance ritual:
As pointed out by Robot 6, Punk wouldn’t be the first pro wrestler involved in comic books — former ECW champ Raven c0-wrote (with Thompson’s husband Brian Azzarello) an issue of Marvel’s Spider-Man anthology Tangled Web in 2002, and Newsarama talked with hardcore legend/Tori Amos fan Mick Foley about his 12 Gauge series, R.P.M., last September. Of course, there have also been multiple comic books about pro wrestling, including Titan’s truly bizarre recent WWE Heroes series, which involved terrorism, reincarnation and the Mayans; y’know, typical pro wrestling stuff.
