De Actiewereld op haar einde (The Stock Market World at Its End)

This Dutch engraving satirizes the collapse of speculative trading during the South Sea Bubble crisis. Fools, rogues, and demons cavort around a bearded patriarch, while text blocks in Dutch address greed and financial ruin. The print employs grotesque caricature—exaggerated noses, bodies, and features—inherited from sixteenth-century Northern prints and refined by Hogarth and his successors. Dense with allegorical figures and marginal commentary, it exemplifies the *Bilderbogen* tradition of combining image and text to expose social folly. Such satirical engravings formed the visual language that would evolve into the sequential narrative panels of nineteenth-century comics and modern comic books, using caricature and symbolic grotesquerie to ridicule economic and moral excess.