De Verwarde Actionisten Torenbouw tot Babel (The Confused Speculators Building the Tower of Babel)

This engraved satire mocks the financial chaos of the South Sea Bubble and concurrent Dutch stock-market mania. Crowds of investors, speculators, and con artists swarm around the Tower of Babel—a metaphor for collective delusion and economic collapse. Angels and demons swirl overhead; the foreground shows the poor and ruined stripped of their possessions. The print combines Bruegel's composition with contemporary political commentary, using biblical catastrophe to ridicule greed and financial folly. Such satirical engravings—rooted in the Northern European tradition of moral caricature—directly prefigure modern comic narrative: crowded scenes, multiple speech scrolls, exaggerated types, and visual wit deployed to expose human vice. The tradition extends through Hogarth and Gillray into the sequential art form.