Given the appetite for Research Cartoons that I discovered in my position as an IRB Administrator, I decided to create a regular newspaper for educating researchers about ethics… in a humorous way. Growing up, I fed myself a steady diet of comic books and MAD magazine, so naturally my tendencies were biased in that direction. One might even say I had a “conflict of interest.” While my ersatz publication was short-lived, I had a lot of fun drawing the cartoons, writing the articles, and designing the puzzles. Often, my work is primarily a way to entertain myself, and if other people want to pay for it, that’s just a bonus!
The title, “Wretched Mess” was a strained acronym that loosely described “Workplace Research Ethics Through Cartoons & Humorous Education.” It had the added benefit of describing my work desk.
Debut Issue - 2004
