Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is a wordless strip about a child asking his parents where babies come from. The father begins by showing the child a picture of a baby, and the child looks confused. The parents then take turns explaining: the father uses the classic "stork" myth (a stork delivering a baby), and the child smiles, satisfied. The mother also uses the stork explanation and the child seems happy with it.

However, when the mother then shows the more anatomically accurate version -- depicting actual human reproduction with a man and woman together producing a baby -- the child becomes visibly disturbed. The final panel reveals a chaotic scene combining all the explanations into one absurd nightmare: a stork attacking naked people in what appears to be a Hieronymus Bosch-style hellscape, with a cherub-like baby flying around, while the child watches in horror from the corner.

The joke is that by receiving multiple partial and contradictory explanations about reproduction (the sanitized stork myth combined with glimpses of the real biological process), the child has synthesized them into a single terrifying and surreal mental image that is far worse than any single straightforward explanation would have been. It satirizes the common parental anxiety about "the talk," suggesting that giving confusing mixed messages is worse than just being direct.