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Explanation
This comic traces the evolution of how adults think about children's literature across three time periods.
Panel 1 -- "Kids' Literature of the Past": An old-fashioned figure (perhaps Victorian-era) says that children's stories should NOT be fantasy, so that children experience real emotions and develop a genuine sense of morality and duty. The idea is that realism builds character.
Panel 2 -- "Kids' Literature of the Present": A modern commentator argues the opposite -- that children SHOULD use fantasy as a vehicle to develop moral imagination, fellowship, and their sense of place in the universe. This represents the contemporary defense of fantasy literature for children (think C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, etc.).
Panel 3 -- "Kids' Literature (The Entire Time)": A child is shown reading and enthusiastically declaring, "There are unicorns and the unicorns are magic!" -- completely oblivious to whatever moral or developmental purpose adults have projected onto the literature.
The humor is in the gap between adult theorizing and children's actual experience. Adults across centuries have debated whether kids should read realism or fantasy, constructing elaborate philosophical justifications for each position. Meanwhile, kids just like the cool magical stuff. The comic punctures intellectual pretension by showing that the audience for children's literature has never cared about the adults' grand theories -- they just want unicorns.