A while back, I blogged about a patent rejected due to prior art in a Carl Barks comic.

I’m reading Only a Poor Old Man, Fantagraphics’ Uncle Scrooge reprint, and see that Barks anticipated the premise of The Gods Must Be Crazy by some decades. In Uncle Scrooge #6 from June, 1954, in the story Tralla La, Scrooge McDuck drops a bottle cap from a plane (instead of a bottle, as in Gods) into a Shangri-La-esque valley in the Himalayas where its scarcity wreaks havoc on an isolated society used to there being plenty of everything for everyone.