CM Punk's Back. Tell a Friend.

Welcome back, Indian style Punk!
Photo Credit: WWE.com

The CM Punk that I fell in love with died when Kevin Nash powerbombed him at SummerSlam last year. I wanted to believe that it wasn't true, because he was still cracking wise at Nash when he could, but something about everything else he was saying felt off, generic even. He even put on Triple H's coat and started acting like him. Sure, he still wrestled his ass off, and his feud with Chris Jericho started out really good at least, but up until the overrun of RAW 1000, the man in the ring was a zombie of what he was even before he dropped his pipe bomb.

Turns out he wasn't dead, just hibernating. When he attacked The Rock, the guy who embodies everything that Pipe Bomb CM Punk is the opposite of, he tantalized people with a "heel turn", but last night on RAW, when he laid bare his issues, it wasn't so much him becoming a traditional villain as it was a resurrection of the character that the Establishment might find dangerous but resonated with the fans as their voice, the Voice of the Voiceless.

For whatever reason, WWE thought that turning Punk into some amalgamation of John Cena, Triple H and Cody from Step by Step would somehow take him to the next level when what he was doing was already taking him from "dude who whined alot about being better than drug users" to "potential next big thing". To me, it's a symptom of Vince McMahon and his writers believing into their own hype and thinking they make the stars, not the other way around.

That being said, it's wholly conceivable that the writing staff believes they're turning him heel here. Faces act cool, heels tell the truth. Last night, Punk was dropping a ton of truth on everything from Rocky to Jerry Lawler. Yeah, he got some audible boos from the people who cling to 1998 and love The Rock like he's Santa Claus, but people were still cheering the shit out of him. That's what the people want. They want pipe bombs.

Granted, they still were believing they were getting pipe bombs. Punk calling John Laurinaitis a stooge wasn't really revolutionary to people like us who've seen people degrade their bosses in WWE since Degeneration X took to mocking Sgt. Slaughter and then the McMahon family. However, to the genpop, that's what good guys do. So whether it's the boss or whether it was a target that deserved it, Punk talking is what endears him to the crowd.

So, if he's going to do it, he might as well do it in awesome fashion. While there are those who have been with him for the whole run, there was definitely a shift in his character that I didn't find as organic as the original burst was. I'm glad that the original Voice of the Voiceless made his way back. It's going to make three-hour RAWs feel a lot smoother than "Triple H Jr." Punk would have.