I don't really agree - the xkcd cartoon is about physicists naively going from real-world phenomena to mathematical models, without understanding what is important or already known about the problem domain.
In his case, a physicist is looking at a problem that already has a standard mathematical formalism in control theory, and is suggesting new theoretical approaches to apply to it that he claims provides additional insights.
And, whereas in the cartoon the physicist says, "why does <your field> need a whole journal, anyway", the author of this monograph publishes in existing control theory journals (e.g., [1] in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control).