The New Bankruptcy Wagon for Mad Actionists

This Dutch woodcut satirizes the South Sea Bubble financial collapse through competing allegorical scenes. The left panel shows a wagon laden with victims and chaos; the right depicts fools being fleeced in a garden of delusion. The verses mock speculators and credit schemes that ruined thousands across Europe. Part of a rich tradition of popular political prints—ancestor to Hogarth's moral narratives and later comic satire—this sheet combines crude woodcut imagery with vernacular song-text to reach common readers. Prints like this circulated as broadsheets, mixing visual caricature with folk poetry to expose financial fraud and human folly. The format established how sequential images and text would eventually structure the modern comic.