Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic satirizes debates about literary canons -- the question of which books are considered essential or "great" literature. It presents four ideological positions in a 2x2 grid format:

• "Great Books Traditionalist": argues that certain works are universally great and should be read by everyone.
• "Multiculturalist": argues that everyone -- women, minorities, and other underrepresented communities -- must have their voices represented in the canon.
• "Decolonialist": argues that canonical books serve only to reinforce existing structures of power, so communities should cultivate their own local reading traditions.
• "Pluralist": argues that the distinction between Eastern/Western or "canon vs. non-canon" literature is itself limiting, and we should not neglect any literature.

In the final panels, a character at a bookstore observes that these positions all sound "pretty stuffy," but then concedes: "But it's much better than reading." The caption identifies this person as representative of most people.

The joke punctures the entire highbrow literary debate by pointing out that the vast majority of people are not engaged in any of these intellectual positions -- they simply do not want to read at all. All four scholarly camps are rendered equally irrelevant by mass indifference to literature. The humor mechanism is deflation: an elaborate intellectual framework is undercut by a mundane, relatable truth.