Monster
Monster
[Four people are standing around a table-top crisis planning model. Cueball and Ponytail are wearing police-style hats; Megan holds a clipboard and Blondie has her hands on the table.] Megan: It's as long as a football field. Runs as fast as a cheetah. Cueball: Weighs as much as a blue whale. Blondie: Can we negotiate with it? Ponytail: No. It has the intelligence of a two-year-old child.
[Caption below the panel:] By the time the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster was finally defeated, it had eaten enough people to fill a stadium and devastated an area the size of Rhode Island.

In this comic, officials and police are evidently trying to describe the extraordinary qualities of a huge monster by comparing it with everyday objects instead of numbers, which seems to be a recurring theme on xkcd (see 526: Converting to Metric , 1047: Approximations ) and also in the Blag article Dictionary of Numbers where Randall says that he doesn't "like large numbers without context."
This comic pokes fun at how common it is in the media to compare things of extraordinary qualities to a certain narrow set of well-known objects. The comic features people discussing a fictional monster which - apparently - can be only described by these overused comparisons. The three used by Megan , Cueball and Ponytail are:
The caption below the panel names the monster the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster , joking that the monster was created by comparing it to things, and continues the joke by comparing the number of killed people to those that could fill a (sports) stadium (of the order tens of thousands), and the area of devastation to the smallest state in the US Rhode Island (1,214 sq mi/3,140 km 2 ) (a state Randall also used for comparison in the What if? Everybody Jump . In another What if? he uses a football stadium filled with ants as a comparison: Lethal Neutrinos .)
The title text takes the joke one step further by comparing the nuclear bomb used to destroy the monster to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War, i.e. they dropped a relatively small nuclear bomb on it (nuclear weapons have advanced significantly since WWII). Here is an example from Wikipedia of such a comparison with the strength of a meteor strike.
[Four people are standing around a table-top crisis planning model. Cueball and Ponytail are wearing police-style hats; Megan holds a clipboard and Blondie has her hands on the table.] Megan: It's as long as a football field. Runs as fast as a cheetah. Cueball: Weighs as much as a blue whale. Blondie: Can we negotiate with it? Ponytail: No. It has the intelligence of a two-year-old child.
[Caption below the panel:] By the time the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster was finally defeated, it had eaten enough people to fill a stadium and devastated an area the size of Rhode Island.
