This Ripley’s daily newspaper comic-page panel falls short on the details about an explosion caused by building up of internal gases during traport of a whale leaving quite a mess everywhere. I decided to look a little further into it. Wikipedia offers a few paragraphs about the incident in a larger whale-explosion collection. MSNBC offers a story with the identical headline as well as the full-color picture (also found @ Wiki) that was used for the Ripley illustration. The 60-ton sperm whale littered and stank up the vicinity after bursting when pressure from decomposing entrails became too intense, but it only seemed to (from the pictures) have split along a lower back region instead of necessarily the typical mental evocation of “explosion”. The MSNBC story also reports that it became a local novelty with a group consisting primarily of men, to, shall we say, catch a glimpse of its rumored massive manhood.