I’m a little confused as to what’s happening here. I presume the school’s not the one that banned them from campus since they still have jobs at the school, so…did they have a criminal trial and were found guilty? That seems to be the implication since Leslie says they have to “appeal”, but they were only arrested yesterday, weren’t they? That seems insanely fast.
If the school wants them to work there wouldn’t the *school* appeal? If they don’t, what does it matter if Leslie and Robin are legally allowed on campus or not?
Wait, did a time skip happen and there was a whole Phoenix Wright trial with Raidah getting them out of jail? That’s amazing if that’s what happened, wild if we skipped that, but Robin’s line implies they’ve only missed one class and it’s still the same day.
They were CT’d, which is a ban enforced by school security (assuming it works like when my husband has people CT’d from his business; he can call the cops on them and they have to leave.) I don’t think a trial is necessary for one of those to be imposed, only to get like punishment on top of it. My husband’s never had to appear in court to testify or anything.
And Becky, Dorothy, and Raidah called a lawyer which I guess answered and was like “what are you talking about, you need a bail bondsman to get them out.” Or at least, my relative that got arrested made bail before we hired his lawyer. The bail can be posted same day.
The police have no authority here to enact such a punishment, so quickly, and without the justice system. If they were banned for a year, it would have been by the school itself, and the appeal through the school board. That’s the *only* thing that makes the basest sort of sense.
Except that Robin’s statements suggest this IS law. Which makes sense, as this is Bizarro World, and so of course the police have the right to effectively fire Robin and Leslie for staying too long at a protest, without trial or due process, just as the police somehow got the keys to every single dorm room in the hall so they do a warrantless search of dozens, if not hundreds of people, none of whom have cell phones to record a massive constitutional rights violation and send it to the press.
Maybe the conditions of bail for the criminal trespass charges?
Agree to whatever in order to get out of jail, then appeal to the judge for more reasonable conditions once you’ve got a lawyer and aren’t sitting in jail.
“The police arrested them for criminal trespass and thus were brought to jail, charged, and are awaiting trial” and “The school imposed penalties on them for not dispersing when told and informed them via e-mail which they can read on their phones” are not mutually exclusive.
My point is, of course it’s the school, the only way it makes sense is that it’s the school, except everyone is acting like it’s not the school, especially the two people who are walking out of a correctional facility instead of the Dean’s office, talking about being banned instead of fired, worrying about a class they clearly don’t teach anymore, and talking about a legal appeal.
And I dont know why the fuck I of all people am sitting here defending the police of all people other than the fact that I want them accountable for what they actually do instead of the imaginary powers the have in Fantasy Indiana. And the more we ascribe all of these wacky nonsense hyper-atrocious crimes, the less serious the REAL crimes seem.
(Ugh sorry for the ND rant. Not stopping now, but still, sorry.)
Like – it’s a horrible abuse of power to go and unlawfully search someone’s hone without a warrant. Its days later, they no longer have the excuse of potential evidence being destroyed. But cops do that – turn off body cams and intimidate individuals to get access to unlawfully search.
But now it’s not ONE cop it’s half the precinct; its not the girl in Clark Wing who matches the description, its EVERY room, in something that would be a ckear and obvious violation of rights if recorded on a phone, that would lead to the removal of the chief of police due to the fact that this level of organization either implies direct involvement or an insane amount of incompetent negligence, and yet, everyone’s just like “yup, police be policing.”
And yeah if this was Trump administration and ICE this’s be accurate but its not; it’s a state university in the freaking midwest and they’re looking for someone that apparantly applies officer stabbed because police brutality involves knives now.
It just completely undermines real world problems so much and just doesnt seem to care if they make those issues seem trivial by comparison or exaggerated by association.
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/05/encampment-iu-palestine-protest-one-year
The article talks about one professor who was banned from campus for a year when released from jail (also charged with criminal trespass). He appealed and got both dismissed a week or so later. It doesn’t make it clear that both were from the legal system, rather than one being from the school, but it certainly doesn’t say otherwise.
In this case, Leslie and Robin have been released from jail with this condition already. It seems unlikely that IU would have been involved directly with their release, so if it was the school, I’d expect they’d have been told separately, but we’re skimming over this so quickly, it’s hard to tell.
That specifically happens when the owner of the property requests it. Police can’t ban people from private property by themselves. They can, however, simply enforce the private property owner’s right to not have certain people on their property.
So again, we’re going on and talking about just how terrible the cops are, when from everything I see here it’s literally the school using the same exact tools that someone else might use to, say, keep an abusive and emotionally unstable man away from his ex-girlfriend’s property. Only nobody’s criticizing the school, the Dean’s never been mentioned, outside of how Sarah’s Amazingly Perfect Boyfriend is his son. The school’s about as conspicuously absent in this story about police as the actual genocide was conspicuously absent in the story about a protest two women discovering that they were madly in love with each other.
Well, I don’t know it works in the US for that specific thing, but in some “justice” systems there are “immediate trials” that are an option, and that are used very often against protestors.
Most people in law and most protestors would know to refuse them, because it’s litterally made to incriminate anyone going there (and it’s also set in a way to spread fear).
This is probably not what happened. I’m guessing it’s more detained overnight, then released without formal charge but with the possibility of charges pending. At worse they currently have a citation/legal summon, with details to be handled later.
The real problem here will be the no-trespass order (i.e. not allowed on campus). These can be issued but they’re oh-so problematic. There’s no formal hearing by the University, so due process hasn’t been followed. The AAUP (the closest thing to a Faculty Union) will have issues with this, but i don’t think IU has proper Union-grievance protections.
Honestly, i can see this resulting in Robin winning her appeal, because she’s a former congresswoman and it’s bad optics to do this for her, and Leslie being stuck with the ban.
Yeah, I’m confused by how she’s banned from campus but not fired? I thought those kinds of things with trespassing were usually determined by the aggrieved party ie the school.
Firing someone requires a process and you have to follow rules. Especially if there’s any kind od union involved. Banning them from campus probably doesn’t require you to follow those rules and then you can use them not being able to do their jobs as your excuse for firing them.
I’d suspect something along the lines of “you are suspended without pay until all your appeals are exhausted” just to tie things in a neat little bow without ever actually “firing” anyone which might run afoul of union agreements or state-level rules or some such.
It’s possible, but apparently in the real life event this is based on, similar bans were applied to arrested protesters and appeals were routinely and quickly granted to students – not sure if there were any professors involved.
It’s mostly there to have more serious legal tools to use against non-students who got caught protesting again.
I’m honestly trying hard for my own sanity to not look at the real-world thing this is based on, but “cops did a bunch of stupid shit, which was immediately unwound by admins/prosecutors” is also pretty on-brand.
I would think it would be more of suspended with/without pay until a board convened until a decision would be made. Maybe the law enforcement told them the wrong thing?
Also, I am curious about the action the campus took. It been a good while but doesn’t school campus are fine with protest as long as its peaceful and in one place? I remember back in my college days there were protests in the campus square and was pretty much left on its on as long as no violence came from it?
In this case in the real world, which this echoes, the school had been okay with protests in the Meadow in the past, but changed the rules to ban them when the Gaza protest started. This actually turned into a big legal fight and the protestors came back and stayed for months I think.
While the message of the protest almost certainly played a role, it wouldn’t surprise me if the intent to camp out indefinitely was a big part of it. I don’t know if previous protests there that were allowed had been long term encampments or more like rallies or marches.
Legally it won’t hold up. You can’t criminally trespass someone who had a legal right to be somewhere.
In reality, which never cares about whats legal, cops can do whatever they want and so can rich people. Its up to the poors to spend more of their money to fight it.
A university absolutely can issue no-trespass orders. Most likely it’s been done, from a purely legal standpoint anyway, based on the encampment and having not dispersed after the time limit was reached for the lawful dispersal order.
I’m guessing this has been issued to everyone caught at the protest as a sort of blanket ban, with the intent of taking out as many protestors as possible. It’s the type of thing that would fall apart very quickly under legal scrutiny, especially in relation to two employees of the University, even more so since there was no formal hearing or due process on the part of the university. They may be working on the expectation that people don’t know their rights and won’t try to appeal.
But overall the point of such a no-trespass order would be to take out as many protestors as possible, especially ones like Jocelyn, who aren’t part of the University in any meaningful way. Most likely, the no-trespass will be dropped for students and faculty members, and kept for anyone else who was there. (with the possible exception of Leslie, because there’s a potential funny in Robin getting to stay while Leslie gets kicked out).
No, this doesn’t work. The university absolutely can say “Nobody is allowed to be in X place” and then consider people (faculty, students, etc.) who have a right (and obligation) to be in other parts of campus as trespassing for being in the parts they were told to leave.
In other, less-horrible situations, it’s not even a bad thing. Faculty have to be on campus to teach, research, and advise, but if the university caught a professor just hanging out in a locked dorm after-hours, without having been legitimately* let in by a resident of that dorm, you would very much want that to be considered trespassing.
*for example, in case you’re thinking catastrophically, “professor of math whose kid just started a bio degree and realized at 10pm that she forgot her inhaler, so she unlocks the dorm so her mom can bring up the spare inhaler.”
interesting it’s considered ‘criminal tresspassing’ but other than a sub/replacement, imagine if leslie just did some zoom meetings as class tho i don’t think she’d get a paycheck for that
jason is either gonna be happy or find it tedious to cover for robin tho
not really? Not sure how long classes are but remember: When they went to find Raidah, classes were just about starting, and here Robin is saying if they hurry the can make it to the last few minutes, so it wasn’t that long.
I suspect the story was longer when Sarah was in the first panel, but it couldn’t be a simple redraw the story with a different primary character, so we dropped a few strips.
Connections in the finding out where the two were, and getting them released (probably some bail or such). But now they need Tony’s connection to get the two instructors working again (and good luck with that, since he doesn’t like buffoonery).
It’s kind of been a whirlwind of a few months for her, too. Dumped her electoral staff, picked up Becky as an emergency assistant, got way too invested in her life, quit the race, got re-hired as a professor, and then got banned after being at a protest that she probably didn’t actually care that much about just because her crush was there.
Then again, I just remembered she has multiple houses, so I don’t have THAT much sympathy for her compared to Leslie.
actually good point. she had zero credibility to back up Becky’s image 180 that she pulled with her twitter; progressives had no reason to trust her sincerity, and were more likely to chalk it up to “that dumbass congresswoman was probably hitting the coke too hard.” Now she’s been jailed for protesting, that’s much more of a grassroots starting point with a new political base.
Been there. Lots of calls, going there, waiting in line, making payment, waiting some more, then getting your peeps outta there. Maybe they want food right away; maybe they want a very hot bath. Depends on conditions in that place and how long they were there.
Also this is a setting where superheroes and supervillains are apparently semi-common and while it would be really fun to see the greater DoA-verse worldbuilding and the Arkham Asylum stand-in with Malevomom and Dadly Do-Wrong in Hannibal Lector maskw and stuff, Willis has already gotten in trouble for using Israel/Gaza as a backdrop for a romance twist and using it as a backdrop for Getting Silly With It would likely not go over well.
We can see the bonkers side of the DoA Justice System some other time when it’s not connected to real-world events.
I’m reading the whole setup as “they were released on their own recognizance and criminally trespassed” rather than Raidah having anything to do with it. I’d have a hard time buying the idea she could get them out within the implied hour or so since last strip, but “we released the non-violent protestors with their trespass orders over a couple of days as we process them” is pretty normal cop shit.
Less likely coincidences have happened in this strip, as have things that would strain credulity more than “undergrad manages to get two protestors released inside of 45 minutes”. I guess we’ll see.
It wouldn’t be that big a twist–her father likely knows a defense attorney, maybe even one doing pro bono work. Detainees who have representation are probably at the front of the line to get released. This certainly is in no way an indictment of the carceral system and the way that people with money and connections receive differences not only in degree, but even in kind, than those without such privilege.
well considering one of my only real complaints of the webcomic is sometimes the pacing of certain arcs drags on longer than it really needs to, im more than happy to skip the whole weeks worth of pages of in universe to get to the point.
though i would have accepted like one strip of them actually arriving there.
Considering they work there, they have a good chance of getting their ban appealed in the courts. I think everybody at the protest that got caught probably got the ban.
They still might lose their job, because the school seems to be run by assholes, but it won’t be because of the Ban, it would be because the school knew they were at the protest.
Sadly, Illinois is an at-will employment state. Which means they can be fired for absolutely any reason (other than protected ones, but all anyone would have to do is state a different reason or refuse to give one) though I think Robin is tenured so she has a contract that might help her. Leslie is certainly not.
The ban isn’t for the protest, the ban is for trespassing
The university changed its own rules literally the day before the protest (which was publicly announced weeks in advance) making it against university rules to use the protest location without permission, thus legally making being there criminal trespass
I mean, considering its the same 3 people from the last comic, and Joyce isn’t there, its probably the same day. if Raidah has a skilled lawyer then she could probably get them out of the holding cell quickly. They still have to go to court to appeal the ban.
I mean they could have involved Jacob and his brother instead of Raidah, but maybe Harrison doesn’t specialise in whatever law gets you out of protest jail.
Harrison doesn’t live in town and this seems like it’s well below his paygrade. He seems like a nice guy and I am sure he’d help if Jacob asked, but I don’t know that he’d have been able to work this quickly
Also true. Harrison has literally worked for Carla’s parents, who are financiers for the school; not at all a safe bet that he would want to work on the side of the protest, even if his morals aligned.
In theory it’s criminal defense (even for small time stuff like this) but I doubt the lawyer really needed to do anything, probably all that happened is they said “can we bail out so-and-so” and the clerk said “yes, sign here and here, that’ll be $x”. The girls probably mostly needed Raidiah’s “connections” because they’re kids and didn’t know where the jail was.
Well, having someone who actually knows procedure and maybe even the name of the desk sergeant probably would still help them get to the front of the line for ‘released on recognizance’, rather than having to get themselves indebted to a bail bondsman (okay, Robin could pay their bail, in any case, I’m sure, but only if Leslie was okay taking her money).
Raidah. Love her, hate her, she gets shit done. She’s like a human uhhhh shuffleboard thing. Idk how to play shuffleboard, she’s good at speeding up plot developments I think even if I largely disagree with her 99% of the time.
Sometimes US law is less about ‘what actually happened’ and more about wasting a bunch of time, paperwork, and sometimes money, particularly for minor “crimes”. Odds are good that they can get it appealed but the consequence for them getting involved in the protest is meant to be the rigmarole involved with them trying to get that appeal.
See also: bail. If you can spare whatever they’re asking for, you can just get back to whatever you usually do (and you should get it back after). If you can’t, there’s a good chance you also need the money from a job you temporarily can no longer get to (unless you pay a bail bondsman, I suppose, so you’re instead losing money that you wouldn’t have to if you were wealthier).
There’s no verdict; there hasn’t been a court case yet. They simply got arrested, charged, and released on bail. I’m pretty sure Leslie’s comment about an appeal is about appealing *the school* on the ban.
I want to get snippy about you being a pedant about the correct formal jargon, but my home is kind of made of glass on that front, and getting basic legal terms wrong is a way bigger impediment to actually communicating clearly than the stuff I usually get pedantic about
1: University changes rules regarding protests and the area this one happened, basically saying it was going to be a trespass to be there for the protest.
2: Robin and Leslie got caught in the dragnet the cops set up, as they failed to realize they should follow Asma. Robin also probably shouted “Do you know who I am?” while making goofy faces for the cops’ helmet cams, which didn’t help things.
3: Robin no longer has any staff to speak of, and Leslie is an adjunct professor without resources, so they were likely at the bottom of the line to be released, and without assistance, might even have been required to go through a bail hearing (and since this was a mass arrest, they would’ve just been part of a fairly long queue, each of whom would need to have a separate hearing).
4: Raidah has unnamed ‘connections’. In this case, I’m guessing a lawyer friend of her father’s who was willing to either A: Take Robin’s money, or B: work pro bono. Having representation moves you through the system much, much faster.
5: However, the school administration has issued blanket Criminal Trespass notices lasting one year to every person arrested at the protest–be they outsider, faculty or student. Since student suspensions and faculty firings usually have a due process in place as part of the enrollment/hiring contracts, this is a fast work-around for the administration to impose sanctions against the ‘troublemakers’.
6: As faculty, there is probably an internal process of appeal open to Robin and Leslie to get the CTs revoke, and it’s this appeal, rather than the one for their arrest, that they are likely discussing here. Works the same way, mostly, but with some body employed by the school doing the deciding, rather than a court.
I mean, the answer re: “what to do about class” is probably to just hold Zoom meetings. If we assume that it’s currently 2026 in-universe, then Robin and Leslie likely had at least some of their higher education during the lockdown. It’s far from an ideal solution (speaking from experience here!) but they’ve likely got experience.
well, assuming she’ll still even get paid for it and such
but while it is important, other than the students closer to her i don’t think that many would be upset about missing out on a gender studies class credit
Credits affect your finances and when you graduate (among a bunch of other things). Oftentimes, certain classes aren’t offered every semester, so you have to plan. So it’s a little odd to assume that the students wouldn’t be affected by this massive change.
What’s more likely is that they get an adjunct to pick up the class just to get it finished, loosely following the original syllabus. Grad students and lecturers are pretty broke, so they usually pick up the slack in the department. Sans that, some other faculty will have to step up.
i wonder how far away it is from campus, imagine if it was only a five min drive, be awkward if any parents visiting the kids saw them on the way there buti dk how many woudl be uptight enough to be like ‘you’re gonna drop out/transfer’
Apparently it IS a five minute drive, if my google maps estimate of ‘directions from Indiana University Bloomington to Monroe County Jail’ are accurate!
I was starting to wonder if maybe other people were right and that this was a later Raidah insert and Willis was telling us he had to redraw the strip.
It’d take me a while to find it but a few months ago when they first talked about doing insert strips, they had mentioned “man this Dorothy isn’t gonna match the other Dorothies around these strips” as well as a preview panel of last strip’s smug Raidah so I do believe Raidah being involved is part of the new strips. I’m not entirely sure what that means for the original plans for Leslie and Robin, if they were always going to be arrested, or if originally someone like Sarah was their go-to for help and it was changed to give Raidah something to do or not. And you’re welcome!
I should also mention that both instances noted above were on bluesky which is part of why I feel like it’d be hard to re-find. Bluesky really doesn’t make it easy to search the archives of an account, phew.
Um, it has been quite a long time for Leslie and Robin! We have been watching Joyce and Dorothy sorting themselves out, changing partners, having sex, doing the weekend etc. Leslie and Robin have been stewing in custody (mmm stewed fruit and custard) all that time and thinking they have been forgotten, nobody cares. Bet they want a shower! And some normality/privacy from which to consider their predicaments.
So the protest organizers were not prepared for the possibility of some protesters getting arrested, and instead it was up to Becky and Dorothy to get a lawyer to get Robin and Leslie out of jail, with help from Raidah. I was really hoping the protest organizers were not so inept that it fell to 3 college students to get them out of jail.
To be fair, I expect that, much like in the real world, the protest organizers are student organizations. Often those student organizations are part of a larger network of such organizations, but even those networks will never have enough resources to provide significant legal protections for protest participants because it’s college students all the way down.
I can’t fault the protests for a lack of legal strategy when the protest was legal up until the night before it happened.
Their complete lack of media savvy (or, apparently, social media presence?) is a bit more on them, but also they’re college students so it’s fairly realistic that their protest was poorly thought out.
Actually you CAN fault Raidah for not having someone from the school newspaper right now to cover this highly newsworthy story of a teacher banned from campus, and the the protests back in the paper.
Wait, DOROTHY’S on the paper! And she’s literally right there! Dorothy, you idiot, pay attention.
wonder how far enough in time it happened, b/c i’d think other than an officer casually giving them punishment, some court stuff would take a while to get to, pre-appeal wise unless no one else got caught/arrested
I note that in the real-world IU arrests following the protest, the following:
The update confirms that students and faculty that were arrested will be able to complete their semester on campus by appealing their trespass warnings through IUPD.
And also:
the Monroe County prosecutor’s office declined to charge any protesters arrested for “criminal trespassing” at Dunn Meadow, citing the “constitutionally dubious process” of the arrests.
There’s also an ACLU lawsuit against the university.
I don’t know how DoA will differ from the real world. Maybe things will normalize quickly. But also, maybe they won’t. Maybe the University trustees will in fact point to Amazi-girl’s assaults on law enforcement as evidence that the protesters were not peaceful.
Even though she was technically a counter-protestor, Mary was also at the protest and didn’t leave when the cops ordered it so Willis has a great opportunity to rip off Andor here with a cutaway gag and I’ll patreonize him twenty bucks if he takes it.
I love Robin so much. I’ve loved her since Shortpacked, and while watching her grow up and mature over the course of that comic was super heartwarming, seeing her as an eternal chaos gremlin in Dumbing of Age always feels like coming home. I hope she continues to somehow fail forward no matter what happens.
Walky needs to have a convo with Robin. A scared straight kinda thing.
Or maybe a scared “straight”? I’m not sure what those quotes are doing, but they feel necessary somehow.
dang, was hoping that they weren’t in jail that Dotty was worried for nothing and they slept in together and forgot to set an alarm. Eh, prolly too soon for these two to end up together.
I’m confused. How could they be banned until they “appeal” after just a couple of days? Surely they wouldn’t have even had a trial yet, unless they just plead guilty at their first court appearance, which wouldn’t allow for appeals. Unless, being banned is part of their bail conditions, and that is what they need to appeal?
That would seem pretty hard for a court to justify as a bail condition, given that they are employed by the school. Banning them from campus effectively terminates their employment.
It’s still not clear to me, unless I missed a source upstream, that IU did this, rather than the justice system.
It certainly happened, but I haven’t seen anything that said the ban from campus was a university thing rather than part of the legal system – most likely bail conditions.
That it’s hard to justify is why it’s easy to appeal.
You can take the bail now with those conditions and fight it from outside or you can sit in jail until a judge has time to get to you. The choice seems easy.
I think people are vastly UNDERESTIMATING how screwed Robin and Leslie are given the RL crackdown that protestors faced and the national attention they got.
I’m just gonna glance upwards, glance down, and as someone who got kinda fucked up by the legal system as a kid thank Willis for not making us go through Grueling Realistic Protracted Legal Cop Horror. This is good!! This works for me.
Ah, robin. In every universe you’d have an easier time if you didn’t give a damn deep down.
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haha WOW
how does that even work ? how is that even possible ?
When you break the law, there are consequences.
And they broke the “don’t piss off powerful people who are also your employer by publicly protesting their finances” law.
I’m a little confused as to what’s happening here. I presume the school’s not the one that banned them from campus since they still have jobs at the school, so…did they have a criminal trial and were found guilty? That seems to be the implication since Leslie says they have to “appeal”, but they were only arrested yesterday, weren’t they? That seems insanely fast.
If the school wants them to work there wouldn’t the *school* appeal? If they don’t, what does it matter if Leslie and Robin are legally allowed on campus or not?
Wait, did a time skip happen and there was a whole Phoenix Wright trial with Raidah getting them out of jail? That’s amazing if that’s what happened, wild if we skipped that, but Robin’s line implies they’ve only missed one class and it’s still the same day.
They were CT’d, which is a ban enforced by school security (assuming it works like when my husband has people CT’d from his business; he can call the cops on them and they have to leave.) I don’t think a trial is necessary for one of those to be imposed, only to get like punishment on top of it. My husband’s never had to appear in court to testify or anything.
And Becky, Dorothy, and Raidah called a lawyer which I guess answered and was like “what are you talking about, you need a bail bondsman to get them out.” Or at least, my relative that got arrested made bail before we hired his lawyer. The bail can be posted same day.
(Obv then the lawyer was like “and yeah I’ll represent your friends, that’ll be a $70,000 retaining fee”)
The police have no authority here to enact such a punishment, so quickly, and without the justice system. If they were banned for a year, it would have been by the school itself, and the appeal through the school board. That’s the *only* thing that makes the basest sort of sense.
Except that Robin’s statements suggest this IS law. Which makes sense, as this is Bizarro World, and so of course the police have the right to effectively fire Robin and Leslie for staying too long at a protest, without trial or due process, just as the police somehow got the keys to every single dorm room in the hall so they do a warrantless search of dozens, if not hundreds of people, none of whom have cell phones to record a massive constitutional rights violation and send it to the press.
Maybe the conditions of bail for the criminal trespass charges?
Agree to whatever in order to get out of jail, then appeal to the judge for more reasonable conditions once you’ve got a lawyer and aren’t sitting in jail.
Welcome to Trump’s Amerikka.
“The police arrested them for criminal trespass and thus were brought to jail, charged, and are awaiting trial” and “The school imposed penalties on them for not dispersing when told and informed them via e-mail which they can read on their phones” are not mutually exclusive.
It’s not, IMO, the police doing this. The police just cut them loose, possibly on bail. It’s their (possibly former) employer, the university.
My point is, of course it’s the school, the only way it makes sense is that it’s the school, except everyone is acting like it’s not the school, especially the two people who are walking out of a correctional facility instead of the Dean’s office, talking about being banned instead of fired, worrying about a class they clearly don’t teach anymore, and talking about a legal appeal.
And I dont know why the fuck I of all people am sitting here defending the police of all people other than the fact that I want them accountable for what they actually do instead of the imaginary powers the have in Fantasy Indiana. And the more we ascribe all of these wacky nonsense hyper-atrocious crimes, the less serious the REAL crimes seem.
(Ugh sorry for the ND rant. Not stopping now, but still, sorry.)
Like – it’s a horrible abuse of power to go and unlawfully search someone’s hone without a warrant. Its days later, they no longer have the excuse of potential evidence being destroyed. But cops do that – turn off body cams and intimidate individuals to get access to unlawfully search.
But now it’s not ONE cop it’s half the precinct; its not the girl in Clark Wing who matches the description, its EVERY room, in something that would be a ckear and obvious violation of rights if recorded on a phone, that would lead to the removal of the chief of police due to the fact that this level of organization either implies direct involvement or an insane amount of incompetent negligence, and yet, everyone’s just like “yup, police be policing.”
And yeah if this was Trump administration and ICE this’s be accurate but its not; it’s a state university in the freaking midwest and they’re looking for someone that apparantly applies officer stabbed because police brutality involves knives now.
It just completely undermines real world problems so much and just doesnt seem to care if they make those issues seem trivial by comparison or exaggerated by association.
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/05/encampment-iu-palestine-protest-one-year
The article talks about one professor who was banned from campus for a year when released from jail (also charged with criminal trespass). He appealed and got both dismissed a week or so later. It doesn’t make it clear that both were from the legal system, rather than one being from the school, but it certainly doesn’t say otherwise.
In this case, Leslie and Robin have been released from jail with this condition already. It seems unlikely that IU would have been involved directly with their release, so if it was the school, I’d expect they’d have been told separately, but we’re skimming over this so quickly, it’s hard to tell.
That specifically happens when the owner of the property requests it. Police can’t ban people from private property by themselves. They can, however, simply enforce the private property owner’s right to not have certain people on their property.
So again, we’re going on and talking about just how terrible the cops are, when from everything I see here it’s literally the school using the same exact tools that someone else might use to, say, keep an abusive and emotionally unstable man away from his ex-girlfriend’s property. Only nobody’s criticizing the school, the Dean’s never been mentioned, outside of how Sarah’s Amazingly Perfect Boyfriend is his son. The school’s about as conspicuously absent in this story about police as the actual genocide was conspicuously absent in the story about
a protesttwo women discovering that they were madly in love with each other.can state universities *do* that?
Well, I don’t know it works in the US for that specific thing, but in some “justice” systems there are “immediate trials” that are an option, and that are used very often against protestors.
Most people in law and most protestors would know to refuse them, because it’s litterally made to incriminate anyone going there (and it’s also set in a way to spread fear).
This is probably not what happened. I’m guessing it’s more detained overnight, then released without formal charge but with the possibility of charges pending. At worse they currently have a citation/legal summon, with details to be handled later.
The real problem here will be the no-trespass order (i.e. not allowed on campus). These can be issued but they’re oh-so problematic. There’s no formal hearing by the University, so due process hasn’t been followed. The AAUP (the closest thing to a Faculty Union) will have issues with this, but i don’t think IU has proper Union-grievance protections.
Honestly, i can see this resulting in Robin winning her appeal, because she’s a former congresswoman and it’s bad optics to do this for her, and Leslie being stuck with the ban.
Yeah, I’m confused by how she’s banned from campus but not fired? I thought those kinds of things with trespassing were usually determined by the aggrieved party ie the school.
Firing someone requires a process and you have to follow rules. Especially if there’s any kind od union involved. Banning them from campus probably doesn’t require you to follow those rules and then you can use them not being able to do their jobs as your excuse for firing them.
I’d suspect something along the lines of “you are suspended without pay until all your appeals are exhausted” just to tie things in a neat little bow without ever actually “firing” anyone which might run afoul of union agreements or state-level rules or some such.
It’s possible, but apparently in the real life event this is based on, similar bans were applied to arrested protesters and appeals were routinely and quickly granted to students – not sure if there were any professors involved.
It’s mostly there to have more serious legal tools to use against non-students who got caught protesting again.
I’m honestly trying hard for my own sanity to not look at the real-world thing this is based on, but “cops did a bunch of stupid shit, which was immediately unwound by admins/prosecutors” is also pretty on-brand.
Of course, in the real world, Leslie no longer has a class to teach anyway, because Gender Studies was eliminated as wrongthink.
I would think it would be more of suspended with/without pay until a board convened until a decision would be made. Maybe the law enforcement told them the wrong thing?
Also, I am curious about the action the campus took. It been a good while but doesn’t school campus are fine with protest as long as its peaceful and in one place? I remember back in my college days there were protests in the campus square and was pretty much left on its on as long as no violence came from it?
In this case in the real world, which this echoes, the school had been okay with protests in the Meadow in the past, but changed the rules to ban them when the Gaza protest started. This actually turned into a big legal fight and the protestors came back and stayed for months I think.
While the message of the protest almost certainly played a role, it wouldn’t surprise me if the intent to camp out indefinitely was a big part of it. I don’t know if previous protests there that were allowed had been long term encampments or more like rallies or marches.
Legally it won’t hold up. You can’t criminally trespass someone who had a legal right to be somewhere.
In reality, which never cares about whats legal, cops can do whatever they want and so can rich people. Its up to the poors to spend more of their money to fight it.
Considering the ICE-”agent” perpetuated murder in Minneapolis, ”legally” means less and less in the US right now.
The Trump regime is speed running fascism, and it doesn’t seem like there is any effective resistance to oppose them.
A university absolutely can issue no-trespass orders. Most likely it’s been done, from a purely legal standpoint anyway, based on the encampment and having not dispersed after the time limit was reached for the lawful dispersal order.
I’m guessing this has been issued to everyone caught at the protest as a sort of blanket ban, with the intent of taking out as many protestors as possible. It’s the type of thing that would fall apart very quickly under legal scrutiny, especially in relation to two employees of the University, even more so since there was no formal hearing or due process on the part of the university. They may be working on the expectation that people don’t know their rights and won’t try to appeal.
But overall the point of such a no-trespass order would be to take out as many protestors as possible, especially ones like Jocelyn, who aren’t part of the University in any meaningful way. Most likely, the no-trespass will be dropped for students and faculty members, and kept for anyone else who was there. (with the possible exception of Leslie, because there’s a potential funny in Robin getting to stay while Leslie gets kicked out).
No, this doesn’t work. The university absolutely can say “Nobody is allowed to be in X place” and then consider people (faculty, students, etc.) who have a right (and obligation) to be in other parts of campus as trespassing for being in the parts they were told to leave.
In other, less-horrible situations, it’s not even a bad thing. Faculty have to be on campus to teach, research, and advise, but if the university caught a professor just hanging out in a locked dorm after-hours, without having been legitimately* let in by a resident of that dorm, you would very much want that to be considered trespassing.
*for example, in case you’re thinking catastrophically, “professor of math whose kid just started a bio degree and realized at 10pm that she forgot her inhaler, so she unlocks the dorm so her mom can bring up the spare inhaler.”
interesting it’s considered ‘criminal tresspassing’ but other than a sub/replacement, imagine if leslie just did some zoom meetings as class tho i don’t think she’d get a paycheck for that
jason is either gonna be happy or find it tedious to cover for robin tho
One of my friends has been teaching at the U. of Ottawa for decades. They started teaching over zoom when the pandemic started and never stopped.
To everyone confused about how this works, it really happened. This storyline is based on what really happened at the Dunn Meadow encampment protesting the Palestinian genocide. Up to and including the police snipers on the roof.
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/05/encampment-iu-palestine-protest-one-year
That article also mentions a professor who was banned from campus from April 25, 2024, to April 25, 2024, due to a typo.
Which I think is the most Robin thing ever and should be Robin’s fate here while Leslie has to go fight to be allowed back.
Well that was quick!
For us, yeah. For them, that was probably several hours.
not really? Not sure how long classes are but remember: When they went to find Raidah, classes were just about starting, and here Robin is saying if they hurry the can make it to the last few minutes, so it wasn’t that long.
She may not be talking about *today’s* class but more like, long term (?)
OK, Robin. Nope, ignore my comment.
I suspect the story was longer when Sarah was in the first panel, but it couldn’t be a simple redraw the story with a different primary character, so we dropped a few strips.
But that’s just a theory.
Hypothesis?
Technically, but in English words are defined by how they are used, so good luck.
Baseless speculation, argument from ignorance, nothingburger, rage-baiting, maybe one of these?
As they are in every other language (good luck everyone, society is a social construct)
In English, words can mean whatever you pineapple them to.
poor Robin
looks like this heavy news and lack of cadbury eggs really taken its toll
TT~TT
strip’s really burying the lede re: robin’s taste in lesbian pornography
I don’t know, it kind of started with it. And followed through with her flirting with Leslie about it.
Yeah this is not a revelation
Robin didn’t even mention in what way their experience didn’t live up to her expectations. Maybe it was even SEXIER than she was expecting.
We can assume so and no one can stop us.
Prison being too sexy would probably end the carceral state faster than it being too cruel.
More carnal than carceral, amirite?
Especially funny when the last strip Robin was in, she was protesting that she was very straight.
She’s obviously a very straight fan of lesbo porns.
Protest consequences, but for the wrong white queer woman. 🙁
Which character needs/deserves a ‘protest’ consequence, in your opinion?
Well let’s give Raidah this: she does have good connections.
Connections in the finding out where the two were, and getting them released (probably some bail or such). But now they need Tony’s connection to get the two instructors working again (and good luck with that, since he doesn’t like buffoonery).
There’s multiple ways to access the dean but I’m not sure if we’re ready for Linda to be relevant again.
If he thinks being at a protest against genocide is “buffoonery” I’m going to count that as a win for me not trusting him from the start.
Don’t trust Tony.
Robin has the magical power of turning anything into buffoonery.
I guess. Kind of weird that there’s basically no hint of what they were. There’s no lawyer with them or anything.
They’ve broken Robin. I didn’t think it possible.
Nothing enough sugar can’t fix…
It’s kind of been a whirlwind of a few months for her, too. Dumped her electoral staff, picked up Becky as an emergency assistant, got way too invested in her life, quit the race, got re-hired as a professor, and then got banned after being at a protest that she probably didn’t actually care that much about just because her crush was there.
Then again, I just remembered she has multiple houses, so I don’t have THAT much sympathy for her compared to Leslie.
Ironically this is a HELL of a way to restart her political career once she recovers and finds herself through the trauma.
actually good point. she had zero credibility to back up Becky’s image 180 that she pulled with her twitter; progressives had no reason to trust her sincerity, and were more likely to chalk it up to “that dumbass congresswoman was probably hitting the coke too hard.” Now she’s been jailed for protesting, that’s much more of a grassroots starting point with a new political base.
I mean teaching was already sort of a fallback for her after politics, the trauma of this might stick for quite a while.
So uh, I dont know about everyone else but I’m kind of disappointed we kind of skipped the whole process of getting them out
I don’t imagine it would have been very interesting, lots of paperwork and such I’m sure.
I don’t know. 2-3 panels of them arriving at the jail cell and the like, having a chat between bars. That’s doable.
Though now i kind of want 22 strips dedicated to filling out a form in meticulous detail with constant sassy interruptions.
The next 3 months of the comic should just have been Dorothy and Raidah filling out paperwork in the same style and tone as Light Yagami.
Patreon-only special with a collab (or at least a cameo) from Legal Eagle.
Nah, I like it, moves things along a little faster (even if I’d have loved more “Robin copes with humor” because I love characters coping with humor)
I imagine it was stressful but tedious and boring in a way that would be difficult to portray in a gag-a-day strip.
The uncertainty followed by seeming anti-climax followed by the reveal of how serious the consequences were is a pretty smart call
Been there. Lots of calls, going there, waiting in line, making payment, waiting some more, then getting your peeps outta there. Maybe they want food right away; maybe they want a very hot bath. Depends on conditions in that place and how long they were there.
Speaking of which, have we really seen the Correctional Center before? I have the memory of Swiss cheese and the Dumbverse/Walkyverse archive is huge.
I assumed if we’ve seen it before it would be related to a certain big toe, and indeed it was:
Oops, link didn’t show up.
Wait, is the text under the reply box lying about a href working? I’d never tried posting a link before. orz
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/collect/
It works, but your hrefs just didn’t have any text like “link” in between the a tags, sorry.
(You can tell if you inspect the source code of the page, the links are there, just invisible.)
We have, yes:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/collect/
Honestly I did feel that way at first but I’m happy to just get through this whole thing expeditiously so I’m all for it.
yeah as it turns out, the legal process in the real world is… very very boring LOL
Also this is a setting where superheroes and supervillains are apparently semi-common and while it would be really fun to see the greater DoA-verse worldbuilding and the Arkham Asylum stand-in with Malevomom and Dadly Do-Wrong in Hannibal Lector maskw and stuff, Willis has already gotten in trouble for using Israel/Gaza as a backdrop for a romance twist and using it as a backdrop for Getting Silly With It would likely not go over well.
We can see the bonkers side of the DoA Justice System some other time when it’s not connected to real-world events.
Can you imagine the effort of getting the photo references to get the locations right for the inside of the jail?
“Yeah, can I just nip inside here for a moment to take some pictures for my comic?”
ooops looks like someone screwed up closing an HTML tag there
[looks around suspiciously to find out who]
I suppose you can blame whichever of the characters in your avatar isn’t you?
I’m reading the whole setup as “they were released on their own recognizance and criminally trespassed” rather than Raidah having anything to do with it. I’d have a hard time buying the idea she could get them out within the implied hour or so since last strip, but “we released the non-violent protestors with their trespass orders over a couple of days as we process them” is pretty normal cop shit.
And it just happened as the three of them walked up to jail? Probably Raidah talked to someone who helped arrange bail or something.
Less likely coincidences have happened in this strip, as have things that would strain credulity more than “undergrad manages to get two protestors released inside of 45 minutes”. I guess we’ll see.
It wouldn’t be that big a twist–her father likely knows a defense attorney, maybe even one doing pro bono work. Detainees who have representation are probably at the front of the line to get released. This certainly is in no way an indictment of the carceral system and the way that people with money and connections receive differences not only in degree, but even in kind, than those without such privilege.
well considering one of my only real complaints of the webcomic is sometimes the pacing of certain arcs drags on longer than it really needs to, im more than happy to skip the whole weeks worth of pages of in universe to get to the point.
though i would have accepted like one strip of them actually arriving there.
Rob showing some real emotion is different…
Robin*
Wow, banned for a year just for supporting a protest? That is fucked up; you should be able to join /any/ protest without it costing you your job.
Considering they work there, they have a good chance of getting their ban appealed in the courts. I think everybody at the protest that got caught probably got the ban.
They still might lose their job, because the school seems to be run by assholes, but it won’t be because of the Ban, it would be because the school knew they were at the protest.
Sadly, Illinois is an at-will employment state. Which means they can be fired for absolutely any reason (other than protected ones, but all anyone would have to do is state a different reason or refuse to give one) though I think Robin is tenured so she has a contract that might help her. Leslie is certainly not.
Tenured? After less than a year? Less than a *semester*?
That’s how good she is at political science.
I said “I think” and it’s a comic with a couple superheroes, so I think I’m in the clear for “that wasn’t a definitive statement”.
You meant to type Indiana, right?
I did, yes. It was sleepy o’clock for me and apparently my brain just picked an I state and went with it.
Roz’s sex tape was legal, but the dean still threatened to kick her off campus over it. It’s super unfair, and super typical.
The ban isn’t for the protest, the ban is for trespassing
The university changed its own rules literally the day before the protest (which was publicly announced weeks in advance) making it against university rules to use the protest location without permission, thus legally making being there criminal trespass
Yeah, so the ban is for the protest.
Yes according to common sense but no according to the courts, and that’s the rub
Fuck the courts, they’re not my real dad.
Should.
Personally, I was pretty cool with the Charlottesville Nazis and the January 6 assholes getting fired.
That skipped forward more than I was expecting.
Looks like some character growth for Robin ahead.
imagine if robin ends up the most successful/well adjusted by the time the comic ends lol
Robin’s metabolism prevents growth.
Oh Robin 🙁
Raidah is even stronger than Dina. Instead of just teleporting herself, she teleported the entire comic about 2-3 weeks.
I mean, considering its the same 3 people from the last comic, and Joyce isn’t there, its probably the same day. if Raidah has a skilled lawyer then she could probably get them out of the holding cell quickly. They still have to go to court to appeal the ban.
I think Masha meant 2-3 irl weeks.
Also it (potentially, I might eat crow on this) saves the author from having to introduce a one-off lawyer character
I mean they could have involved Jacob and his brother instead of Raidah, but maybe Harrison doesn’t specialise in whatever law gets you out of protest jail.
Harrison doesn’t live in town and this seems like it’s well below his paygrade. He seems like a nice guy and I am sure he’d help if Jacob asked, but I don’t know that he’d have been able to work this quickly
Also, they already knew for sure that Raidah was supportive of the protest, so it seems like it’d make more sense to ask her.
Also true. Harrison has literally worked for Carla’s parents, who are financiers for the school; not at all a safe bet that he would want to work on the side of the protest, even if his morals aligned.
In theory it’s criminal defense (even for small time stuff like this) but I doubt the lawyer really needed to do anything, probably all that happened is they said “can we bail out so-and-so” and the clerk said “yes, sign here and here, that’ll be $x”. The girls probably mostly needed Raidiah’s “connections” because they’re kids and didn’t know where the jail was.
Well, having someone who actually knows procedure and maybe even the name of the desk sergeant probably would still help them get to the front of the line for ‘released on recognizance’, rather than having to get themselves indebted to a bail bondsman (okay, Robin could pay their bail, in any case, I’m sure, but only if Leslie was okay taking her money).
Lew Yarrow
not funny, boooooooooooooooooo!
Keep this up and she’s going to fast forward us all the way to a point in time when you’ve finally stopped hating her.
Dina stronger than Raidah, she just having a really off day right now, if not the worst day of her life T~T
Raidah. Love her, hate her, she gets shit done. She’s like a human uhhhh shuffleboard thing. Idk how to play shuffleboard, she’s good at speeding up plot developments I think even if I largely disagree with her 99% of the time.
Yeah! As much as we grouse about pacing, it really does feel like we skipped ahead a couple days.
It’s pizza lunch with Hank again. 🙁
TBF that probably would have been more exhausting than anything
If i wanted to listen to a grampa repeat conservative propoganda i would have gone to Thanksgiving last year (-_-)
TEMPO-ported. Or Temported.
Yeah, nothing’s much the same anymore. Or going to be. For a while.
How is it trespassing? Don’t they work there? That’s a bad lawyer? Did the university press charges? US law is weird.
Because they made protesting in that area illegal.
It was probably a blanket ban for everybody they caught at the protests, not targeted.
Sometimes US law is less about ‘what actually happened’ and more about wasting a bunch of time, paperwork, and sometimes money, particularly for minor “crimes”. Odds are good that they can get it appealed but the consequence for them getting involved in the protest is meant to be the rigmarole involved with them trying to get that appeal.
Sage Wisdom:
If the punishment of a crime is cash or time then it’s a punishment only meant for poor people.
Amen to that!
See also: bail. If you can spare whatever they’re asking for, you can just get back to whatever you usually do (and you should get it back after). If you can’t, there’s a good chance you also need the money from a job you temporarily can no longer get to (unless you pay a bail bondsman, I suppose, so you’re instead losing money that you wouldn’t have to if you were wealthier).
In civil cases, it’s almost always a big corp trying to bury a little guy under legal fees, debt and eternal delays.
I don’t think it’s an airtight verdict, just something that’ll be a pain to appeal
There’s no verdict; there hasn’t been a court case yet. They simply got arrested, charged, and released on bail. I’m pretty sure Leslie’s comment about an appeal is about appealing *the school* on the ban.
I want to get snippy about you being a pedant about the correct formal jargon, but my home is kind of made of glass on that front, and getting basic legal terms wrong is a way bigger impediment to actually communicating clearly than the stuff I usually get pedantic about
The university changed its rules the day before the protest making it a crime to gather at that spot without permission
Okay, through the whole thing:
1: University changes rules regarding protests and the area this one happened, basically saying it was going to be a trespass to be there for the protest.
2: Robin and Leslie got caught in the dragnet the cops set up, as they failed to realize they should follow Asma. Robin also probably shouted “Do you know who I am?” while making goofy faces for the cops’ helmet cams, which didn’t help things.
3: Robin no longer has any staff to speak of, and Leslie is an adjunct professor without resources, so they were likely at the bottom of the line to be released, and without assistance, might even have been required to go through a bail hearing (and since this was a mass arrest, they would’ve just been part of a fairly long queue, each of whom would need to have a separate hearing).
4: Raidah has unnamed ‘connections’. In this case, I’m guessing a lawyer friend of her father’s who was willing to either A: Take Robin’s money, or B: work pro bono. Having representation moves you through the system much, much faster.
5: However, the school administration has issued blanket Criminal Trespass notices lasting one year to every person arrested at the protest–be they outsider, faculty or student. Since student suspensions and faculty firings usually have a due process in place as part of the enrollment/hiring contracts, this is a fast work-around for the administration to impose sanctions against the ‘troublemakers’.
6: As faculty, there is probably an internal process of appeal open to Robin and Leslie to get the CTs revoke, and it’s this appeal, rather than the one for their arrest, that they are likely discussing here. Works the same way, mostly, but with some body employed by the school doing the deciding, rather than a court.
ah, darn, I was hoping Frieda would be a District Attorney prosecuting Robin now.
Golly I feel that, Robin.
This could be a comment on panel 1 or panel 5 but in the interests of your privacy I’ll keep it in my own head-canon.
Panel 4 is also a possibility.
I mean, the answer re: “what to do about class” is probably to just hold Zoom meetings. If we assume that it’s currently 2026 in-universe, then Robin and Leslie likely had at least some of their higher education during the lockdown. It’s far from an ideal solution (speaking from experience here!) but they’ve likely got experience.
It ultimately depends if Leslie still even has a job.
well, assuming she’ll still even get paid for it and such
but while it is important, other than the students closer to her i don’t think that many would be upset about missing out on a gender studies class credit
Credits affect your finances and when you graduate (among a bunch of other things). Oftentimes, certain classes aren’t offered every semester, so you have to plan. So it’s a little odd to assume that the students wouldn’t be affected by this massive change.
What’s more likely is that they get an adjunct to pick up the class just to get it finished, loosely following the original syllabus. Grad students and lecturers are pretty broke, so they usually pick up the slack in the department. Sans that, some other faculty will have to step up.
💔
Destroy the system, Dorothy.
I was not expecting Robin to get hit with being impacted by negative consequences.
Interesting.
They broke Robin. That’s heartbreaking.
It’s happened before.
Follow-up to https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/newleaf/
Also Robinbreaking.
Y’know Leslie, Robin looks like she might need some comforting.
(let me ship this)
they go on a cadbury binge together and awkwardly end up in the dentist office of that lady she hooked up with lool
Why this Raidah so mad?
I guessing she was hoping they’d be in more trouble so she’d get to flex her connections more
Probably just annoyed at Robin’s robinness
If you are like me and wondered, from the alt text, “huh I wonder where else Willis used that establishing shot” THEN WONDER NO MORE!!! https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/collect/
oooh
i wonder how far away it is from campus, imagine if it was only a five min drive, be awkward if any parents visiting the kids saw them on the way there buti dk how many woudl be uptight enough to be like ‘you’re gonna drop out/transfer’
Apparently it IS a five minute drive, if my google maps estimate of ‘directions from Indiana University Bloomington to Monroe County Jail’ are accurate!
Thank you for your public service!!!
I was starting to wonder if maybe other people were right and that this was a later Raidah insert and Willis was telling us he had to redraw the strip.
It’d take me a while to find it but a few months ago when they first talked about doing insert strips, they had mentioned “man this Dorothy isn’t gonna match the other Dorothies around these strips” as well as a preview panel of last strip’s smug Raidah so I do believe Raidah being involved is part of the new strips. I’m not entirely sure what that means for the original plans for Leslie and Robin, if they were always going to be arrested, or if originally someone like Sarah was their go-to for help and it was changed to give Raidah something to do or not. And you’re welcome!
I should also mention that both instances noted above were on bluesky which is part of why I feel like it’d be hard to re-find. Bluesky really doesn’t make it easy to search the archives of an account, phew.
I know apples have appeal, lemons too
everything’s the same, but everything will change
Look, if you can’t cope with humour, can you even cope?
“I’ve got to figure out what to do about class”
Just let Roz do it, duh.
lol the last time she had roz ‘teach’ the class, wasn’t it a roast on her like calling her out for being ‘performative’?
That’s how it went.
The strip in question:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/greatget/
Um, it has been quite a long time for Leslie and Robin! We have been watching Joyce and Dorothy sorting themselves out, changing partners, having sex, doing the weekend etc. Leslie and Robin have been stewing in custody (mmm stewed fruit and custard) all that time and thinking they have been forgotten, nobody cares. Bet they want a shower! And some normality/privacy from which to consider their predicaments.
The last time Leslie and Robin showed up in a strip was end of June.
It’s been six months of protest fallout storyline since.
I think this is the most clarity Robin’s ever had
They must have limited her sugar intake while she was on the inside.
So the protest organizers were not prepared for the possibility of some protesters getting arrested, and instead it was up to Becky and Dorothy to get a lawyer to get Robin and Leslie out of jail, with help from Raidah. I was really hoping the protest organizers were not so inept that it fell to 3 college students to get them out of jail.
To be fair, I expect that, much like in the real world, the protest organizers are student organizations. Often those student organizations are part of a larger network of such organizations, but even those networks will never have enough resources to provide significant legal protections for protest participants because it’s college students all the way down.
I can’t fault the protests for a lack of legal strategy when the protest was legal up until the night before it happened.
Their complete lack of media savvy (or, apparently, social media presence?) is a bit more on them, but also they’re college students so it’s fairly realistic that their protest was poorly thought out.
Actually you CAN fault Raidah for not having someone from the school newspaper right now to cover this highly newsworthy story of a teacher banned from campus, and the the protests back in the paper.
Wait, DOROTHY’S on the paper! And she’s literally right there! Dorothy, you idiot, pay attention.
Like every “gosh golly, won’t someone think of the system” centrist, Dorothy’s useless.
She is literally the reason they got out of jail excuse her for focusing on the important part instead of every single optic.
While it’s nice to get Leslie of jail, I wonder how many other protesters are still there?
Wow, Robin hit the hard character development wall.
it’s about time
Was she possessed by Walky for a second?
Robin needs to smooth this over with comedy, let her have her yucks.
Amazing turnaround. Still consequences but I didn’t expect a strip-skip resolve.
wonder how far enough in time it happened, b/c i’d think other than an officer casually giving them punishment, some court stuff would take a while to get to, pre-appeal wise unless no one else got caught/arrested
gasp, chara development for robin?
wow that’s a helluva lore dump for 5 panels.
Nooo, Robin! My main man, don’t let this get to you too much =( !
I note that in the real-world IU arrests following the protest, the following:
And also:
There’s also an ACLU lawsuit against the university.
I don’t know how DoA will differ from the real world. Maybe things will normalize quickly. But also, maybe they won’t. Maybe the University trustees will in fact point to Amazi-girl’s assaults on law enforcement as evidence that the protesters were not peaceful.
Once Robin explains she was there to belittle the protestors, her appeal could go through easier.
She was there because she cares. Her sign even says so.
Even though she was technically a counter-protestor, Mary was also at the protest and didn’t leave when the cops ordered it so Willis has a great opportunity to rip off Andor here with a cutaway gag and I’ll patreonize him twenty bucks if he takes it.
I’ll love that, too. But I’m afraid Mary looks wealthy enough to bail the shit out jail in a fast time.
I love Robin so much. I’ve loved her since Shortpacked, and while watching her grow up and mature over the course of that comic was super heartwarming, seeing her as an eternal chaos gremlin in Dumbing of Age always feels like coming home. I hope she continues to somehow fail forward no matter what happens.
:///
The College should go to jail.
“The University is banned from the University campus for one year.”
Banned from campus for a year? Proper fuckery from the Uni. Damn.
I’ve been thinking “Why do these children have to bail their teachers out? Shouldn’t that be the Uni’s job?”
Well now I know better.
Geez, the drama tag’s even been pulled for joke characters like Robin!
Props to Raidah for actually going with.
Gotta be visibly seen doing this, yeah?
To build connections with a former Congresswoman, and to boil Sarah’s blood. It ticks all the boxes.
Robin’s last speech bubble will be America’s motto for 2016.
Walky needs to have a convo with Robin. A scared straight kinda thing.
Or maybe a scared “straight”? I’m not sure what those quotes are doing, but they feel necessary somehow.
dang, was hoping that they weren’t in jail that Dotty was worried for nothing and they slept in together and forgot to set an alarm. Eh, prolly too soon for these two to end up together.
Poor Becky. Was looking to be consoled by Leslie and Robin; now she is the one that must to console both…
oof robins taking the intentional denial road i see.
Blurry eyes again, I got “intentional dental road” and thought wait no, that’s Leslie…?
she really is becky’s third mom
Don’t you think she looks tired?
I’m confused. How could they be banned until they “appeal” after just a couple of days? Surely they wouldn’t have even had a trial yet, unless they just plead guilty at their first court appearance, which wouldn’t allow for appeals. Unless, being banned is part of their bail conditions, and that is what they need to appeal?
That would seem pretty hard for a court to justify as a bail condition, given that they are employed by the school. Banning them from campus effectively terminates their employment.
I don’t think it’s a court decision. The university administration banned them from campus and that’s what they have to appeal.
It could just be standard policy.
If you get arrested, you’re banned from campus.
As was pointed out further upstream, this is being based on a real-life thing IU did.
It’s still not clear to me, unless I missed a source upstream, that IU did this, rather than the justice system.
It certainly happened, but I haven’t seen anything that said the ban from campus was a university thing rather than part of the legal system – most likely bail conditions.
That it’s hard to justify is why it’s easy to appeal.
You can take the bail now with those conditions and fight it from outside or you can sit in jail until a judge has time to get to you. The choice seems easy.
Becky was looking for her Moms to parent her through this crisis, but it turns out she’s just gonna have to parent Robin, instead.
People are vastly overestimating how much the courts are involved with a detainment for trespassing. It’s not like they committed a felony
I think people are vastly UNDERESTIMATING how screwed Robin and Leslie are given the RL crackdown that protestors faced and the national attention they got.
People can’t estimate for shit, is what I’m getting here.
Whew. Good call, Dorothy.
I’m just gonna glance upwards, glance down, and as someone who got kinda fucked up by the legal system as a kid thank Willis for not making us go through Grueling Realistic Protracted Legal Cop Horror. This is good!! This works for me.
Ah, robin. In every universe you’d have an easier time if you didn’t give a damn deep down.
Raidah being deeply unimpressed with Robin in the background is very funny.
Dang