De Stropende Actie-Valk omhals, En't Bubbel-Rotje onder de klaauwed van den UIL

This Dutch wood engraving satirizes the South Sea Bubble financial collapse through allegorical figures: a predatory owl (the UIL, representing rapacious speculators) devours smaller birds symbolizing ruined investors. The accompanying verse in Dutch folk idiom amplifies the moral lesson—a tradition inherited from Hogarth's English satirical prints and the German Bilderbogen popular sheets. Stock-jobbing, gambling, and class anxiety dominate the composition. Printed on cheap paper for mass distribution, such images pioneered the fusion of image and text that would define later comic broadsheets and eventually comic books: accessible, urgent, and designed for the street rather than the salon.