Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic reimagines the Arthurian legend of the sword in the stone from a political perspective. In the original myth, whoever pulls the sword Excalibur from the stone is destined to be king of England. In the top panel, a medieval man excitedly announces that a boy has pulled the sword from the stone and shall therefore be king of all England.

The bottom panel shows a newspaper headline reading "Boy Pulls Sword From Stone! Representative Government Cancelled." The joke highlights the absurdity of the legend from a modern democratic standpoint -- that an entire nation's system of governance would be overturned because a random child performed a feat of strength (or magic). It satirizes the notion of divine right of kings and hereditary monarchy by framing it the way a modern newspaper would report it: as the cancellation of representative government, emphasizing how bizarre and antidemocratic the premise of the Arthurian legend really is when viewed through contemporary eyes.