Back in the old days, when patent examiners actually did their job and only granted patents to genuinely novel and useful inventions, a Donald Duck comic may have undone a patent application:
There is a famous story (among patent attorneys, at least) about a Donald Duck story being used as prior art against a patent on a method of raising a sunken ship. A 1949 Donald Duck story used the same technique.
How do you quickly raise a sunken ship full of sheep? The Danish inventor Karl Krøyer came up with a very creative solution: pump buoyant bodies into the ship to achieve sufficient upward lift to bring the ship back to the surface. The solution was so creative he got a patent on it. In a 1949 Donald Duck story, titled The Sunken Yacht a ship is raised by stuffing it full of ping-pong balls. That kind of prior art could kill the patent. But whether the story was actually used by a patent office to refuse the patent (application) remains unclear.
(Thanks, Javier!)
