The X-Axis will be up… mmm, probably Monday night at this rate.  Best get this post done first, since there’s not much point previewing a show after it’s happened.

We do have a podcast up today, though, so check that out one post below.

Anyway.  Time again for one of the more important B-shows in the WWE pay-per-view calendar.  The winners of the Money in the Bank ladder matches win title shots – one for the WWE Title, one for the World Heavyweight Title – that they can cash in whenever they want.  That rule has been taken absolutely literally, so the winner basically gets to hang around for months on end waiting for an ambush attempt.  Once in a blue moon a well-meaning babyface actually plays fair and uses his title shot to headline a major show, but that’s not a very smart idea.

So in practice, the winners of these matches will go on, at some point in the next year, to be major players.  That’s why this show matters.  This is the point where they really win the title; the actual cashing-in is usually a bit of a formality.

Will I be watching this one?  Um, probably not, because I don’t have time.  Still, let’s see what’s on the card…

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Wrestling preview time!  Payback is the new name for the June show.  Last year this show was called No Way Out (except in Germany, long story, don’t ask), but this time they’ve come up with a different name for what remains an un-themed show.  Come to think of it, it does feature all six titles being defended, which is going to be presented as a gimmick when we get to Night of Champions in September.  Here, though, it’s just a coincidence.

It’s an odd card – a promising undercard, but with a sprawling main event that doesn’t sound very good and surely has to drain time from everyone else.

1.  WWE Title – Three Stages of Hell Match: John Cena (c) v Ryback.  So here’s where we stand.  John Cena regained the WWE title at Wrestlemania in April, after chasing it for months.  In May, he defended it at Extreme Rules against Ryback.  This was problematic.  Cena had only just got the title, but Ryback had only just turned heel (and has been desperately short of credible wins ever since they decided to push him to the main event).  So it didn’t make enormous sense for either to lose.   (more…)

After the usual post-Wrestlemania lull, the WWE’s pay-per-view schedule gets back underway this weekend.  Frankly, I probably won’t have time to watch this one anyway, but I can’t honestly say it’s a card that gives me a lot of reasons to regret that.  (Except, perhaps, the two Shield matches.)

1.  WWE Title – Last Man Standing Match: John Cena (c) v Ryback.  Cena regained the WWE Title at Wrestlemania to the surprise of precisely nobody, since The Rock plainly wasn’t going to be sticking around forever.  There was in fact some suggestion at one point that he would be doing the (normally) obligatory rematch, but that became academic when he suffered a legitimate injury at Wrestlemania.  So he’s out of the picture for the foreseeable future at least.

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The biggest, and longest, show of the year.  And also the one most heavily laden with veteran part-timers to boost the star power at the top end of the card – not exactly a ringing endorsement of the WWE’s faith in its current full-time roster.  Then again, this is also a card intended to have the greatest appeal to more casual fans who will only buy one show a year; hence the march of the semi-retired.

1.  WWE Title: The Rock v John Cena.  The Rock has held the title since January, not that he’s done a great deal with it – aside from defending it on the February show, he’s not wrestled at all, and he’s only been a sporadic presence on the TV shows thanks to promotional work for his movies.  In short, he’s been an absentee champion, but since he’s meant to be a babyface this has generally been played down.

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The WWE’s February show is always an awkward one.  The Royal Rumble in January determines the challenger for (one of) the world title(s) at Wrestlemania; that show doesn’t come until early April.  Meanwhile, there’s a show to fill.  In recent years, that slot has been taken with Elimination Chamber, based on a six-man cage match.  The idea is that two men start, another four enter at five minute intervals, elimination occurs by pinfall or submission, and the last person left is the winner.

Previously, the company has taken the extraordinarily ill-advised approach of putting both the Raw and Smackdown titles in the line in separate Elimination Chamber matches – thus rather undermining the significance of the Royal Rumble, by giving another ten challengers a shot the next month.  This time round, sense has finally prevailed – they’ve dropped that idea, and finally gone for what they should have done all along: since Rumble winner John Cena has elected to go for Raw’s title at Wrestlemania, the Chamber will decide who challenges for Smackdown’s.

Of course, that also means that the rest of the card is free to feature more or less normal matches.

1.  WWE Title: The Rock v CM Punk.  Rock is going to be around until Wrestlemania, and as widely expected, he won the title at the Rumble in his big comeback, ending CM Punk’s year-plus title reign.  This all makes perfect sense, since if you’re going to shell out for Rock to be on the show at Wrestlemania, you probably want him to be in the main event.

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The first pay-per-view of 2013 is, as ever, one of the big ones.  From here through to the spring, the WWE will be beating the phrase “Road to Wrestlemania” into the ground, because the next few months will be entirely about the build to Wrestlemania at the start of April.  Traditionally that starts here, because the winner of the titular battle royal is the challenger for the world title at that show.

Now, in practice, this has been undermined in recent years, because (a) they have two world titles, one for Raw and one for Smackdown, and so they can palm off the Rumble winner on the secondary Smackdown title if they want; and (b) there’s now a February pay-per-view which has to be filled, which means that in practice the Mania main event isn’t fixed here after all.  But still, it’s an important show in storyline terms, and it has an established history of being used to help rising stars break from the pack.  Whether that’s going to happen this year is maybe another question.

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Late in the day (for me, at least), but let’s quickly run down tonight’s PPV before I turn to the comics reviews.  After all, this one’s a bit more time-critical.

TLC, the final PPV of the year, is a themed show and a hangover from the days of a decade past when wrestling was significantly more reckless in terms of the level of damage people were willing to expose themselves to in the name of entertainment.  It stands for “Tables, Ladders and Chairs”, a gimmick match that made a bit more sense in its original context, as part of a three-way feud between the Dudley Boys, the Hardy Boys and Edge & Christian (who were, at that point, associated with tables, ladders and chairs respectively).

Nowadays, it’s just a particularly chaotic version of the ladder match that gets brought out once a year, with the undercard traditionally including one regular ladder match, one tables match (in which you win by, er, throwing your opponent through a plywood table – again, it made sense as part of the Dudleys’ gimmick), and one chairs match (which is just stupid, but they needed to invent such a thing to fit the theme of the show).

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As I believe we mentioned on the last podcast, Al’s off at Thought Bubble this weekend, so we’ll be back next week (possibly with some interviews, you never know).

X-Axis will… yeah, that’ll probably be Monday, the way things are going.  Busy weekend.

But this article is a preview of something that airs tomorrow, so let’s run it down.

Historically, Survivor Series was the WWE’s fourth-biggest show of the year (behind Wrestlemania, Royal Rumble and Summerslam), but nowadays it’s just a monthly show with a particularly well-established gimmick, the ten-man elimination tag team match.  The downside with ten-man tags is that they really do chew through a lot of wrestlers, so at a time like this, when roster depth is not at an all-time high, there’s a certain degree of lip service being paid to the concept.  We do have one as the semi-main event, but it’s been painfully obvious that the company is making it up as they go along right now…

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Hell in a Cell is one of the most talked-about pay-per-views in wrestling circles for quite a while.  Granted, much of that talk focusses on the questions “What were they thinking?” and “How are they going to get out of it?”  But people are talking.

This show is a hangover from the WWE’s experiment with giving every PPV a theme.  That idea didn’t work out so well.  It didn’t do much for sales (in fact, sales have increased this year after the theming concept was dropped), and it resulted in gimmick matches being shoehorned into storylines that didn’t really want them, to the mutual disadvantage of both gimmick and storyline.  This show illustrates the problem rather neatly.

Once upon a time, the Hell in a Cell match was a heavily protected gimmick that carried a bit of weight in its own right.  Essentially, it’s just a cage match, but great effort went into presenting it as a particularly brutal cage match.  Of course, when you start wheeling it out for whatever title defence happens to seem suitable in October, the veneer starts to fade.

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Of all the WWE’s second-tier themed pay-per-views, Night of Champions ought to be the easiest to write.  The theme is, quite simply, that all the company’s championships will be defended on the same show.  This is barely much of a concept at all, since most of the titles are defended on each show anyway.  But it avoids having to shoehorn a gimmick match into a storyline that isn’t ready for it.  You can just book some title defences.

Despite this seemingly easy remit, the build-up for Night of Champions 2012 has been more than a little shambolic.  The problem for the writers is that the company actually spends very little time trying to build interest in the second-tier titles, and so most of the main storylines don’t involve them at all.  The result has been one featured match that doesn’t have a title at stake at all, and two matches in which characters engaged in their own storylines have suddenly been shoved into a title match even though the defending champion has nothing to do with the story at all.  Oh, and one match that is only taking place at all by accident.

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