At UFC 203, CM Punk puts all of his fight training and preparation to the test in his debut against Mickey Gall.
Fans of the openly-geek, former WWE performer are excited — and also a bit anxious — to see how he fares inside the octagon.
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His training schedule has focused him on his upcoming match, which put him behind on his other projects. ComicBook.com recently had a chance to speak with Punk about a number of things that he has, unfortunately had to put on the back burner.
“Oh God, my, my to-read list is actually kind of embarrassing, it’s about as tall as I am,” he said. “Brubaker just finished The Fade Out, he just had a new book come out called Kill or be Killed which I haven’t read yet. I’m sure it’s excellent. Jason Aaron’s Thor has been fun, but he’s got a lot of other stuff that’s out. It’s all good, both those guys, everything they touch is gold.”
The training required to compete in a UFC ring is tremendous, but for CM Punk (whose real name Phil Brooks), starting a comic series is actually a bit more intimidating.
“I think writing a comic book is way more nerve-wracking than training for a fight,” he said. “I would rather spar with Anderson Silva and see that coming down the pipe at me than a deadline.
“I’m not sure why I would be more anxiety-riddled to write some pages, but it was always just harder to get those out. Sparring it’s more, just get in and get it done and get going. With writing, sometimes it just doesn’t want to come out.”
Even though it was at times taxing, Punk truly enjoyed working on Drax, and similar to UFC, he threw himself into the project completely.
“The experience on Drax was awesome,” he said. “It was kind of a crash course in writing comic books for me; dealing with writers, with artists, with editors and stuff like that, and I would always groan, ‘I gotta write my pages,’ but now I miss it.
“We’re working on hopefully starting up a new book or doing something else soon.”
Drax pulled references and traits from its writer quite a bit, with significant personality traits of the author making it into the characters and the world.
“I think if you know me, you can see that there’s a lot of CM Punk in the pages of Drax,” he said. “Different characters, I was always throwing little shoutouts and some movie quotes and stuff like that in there, so you can definitely see, I think, a lot of the characters from my life in the characters in the book.”
While Punk loves the character of Drax, there is another popular vigilante he would love to write at some point down the line.
“If I had it my way I would be writing Punisher,” he said. “I don’t need an on-going, I just need about 12 good issues to kick out a good Frank Castle story.”
(It can’t just be me that wants to see that happen, right?)
Before ending our conversation, we asked Punk to book a dream match for Drax the Destroyer, and it turns out he’s partial to slugfests.
“I grew up on Hulk versus Thing, so I would maybe throw Thing in there against Drax,” he said. “I think that would be a good one.”
Fans will finally get to see CM Punk in a UFC ring when he faces Mickey Gall at UFC 203, which takes place on September 10th.
