In the Mr. Bean episode "Hair by Mr. Bean of London", initially released exclusively on VHS in November 1995, whilst Mr. Bean is at the barber's, he picks up a copy of the Dandy and reads it while he's waiting.
We could just flip backwards through Comic Vine's archives until we get to this cover, but there is, quite by chance, one tiny thing that narrows the field. As Mr. Bean peruses the issue, then catches sight of the various hairstyles on display on the wall, we can briefly but clearly see the title panel for Blinky.
And Blinky didn't start out in the Dandy. He originated in the Beezer in 1958 as the elderly Colonel Blink ("the short-sighted gink"), predominantly drawn by Tom Bannister with others occasionally serving as ghost-artists. The Colonel was then revamped into a young boy when the comic merged with Topper in 1990 (a similar thing happened to the protagonist of The Numskulls at the same time, and whilst the title character of the spy fiction parody Send for Kelly was unaffected his assistant Cedric was replaced with his nephew Harry), with George Martin taking over as artist. When Beezer and Topper folded in late 1993, Blinky was one of the strips to survive in weekly format when he moved over to the Dandy (the Beezer continued in annuals and Summer Specials for several years afterwards, and Colonel Blink reappeared for those), with another new artist, Nick Brennan, providing a noticeably different take than Martin. But anyway, that reduces the window to one a bit shorter than two years.
Bam. Issue #2784. From 1995, unsurprisingly... and the issue is dated April 1st, 1995. (The cover also happens to depict Desperate Dan in a not entirely un-Bean-like situation.) A coincidence, or a deliberate Easter egg? You might expect a barber's waiting-room to have a few back issues, not the one currently on sale...
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