Characters / Joe vs. Elan School

Joe vs. Elan School has a large rotating cast of characters, who frequently come and go from Joe's life for various reasons. Because of this, expect MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD.

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Joe

Joe Nobody

The main character and narrator of the comic. At age 16 he's sent to Elan School, where he is abused for three years, and spends the rest of his life dealing with the post-traumatic stress.

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• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: After leaving Elan, Joe notices that one of his main ways of coping with his traumas, especially when he is having a depressive period, is to drink a lot. He freely admits that being heavily under the influrence has been the impetus for what can easily be considered some of the stupider and rasher decisions in his life. In Chapter 94, he relates how "Drunk Joe" decided that taking a shortcut through a dark, seemingly empty alley, rather than just sticking to a crowded street, because it would save him maybe 10-15 minutes of walking, which resulted in him almost getting mugged.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Joe notices the stigma of Elan has followed him when he's at a neighborhood get-together and several of the neighborhood fathers don't mask their quiet dislike for him. Also happens later on in college, where Joe's lack of social skills turn him into a pariah.
• Alone in a Crowd: Joe at the end of Chapter 63, when he's at the party with his sister; he says that observing the other partygoers makes him feel like he's observing aliens. He makes small talk with a girl outside the party but doesn't hear anything she says; in a moment of bravado he excuses himself, goes inside, and immediately gets overwhelmed by everything going on. Then the Elan conditioning seeps into his brain and causes him to start judging the partygoers based on what Elan called "image."
• Babies Ever After: In the Epilogue, Joe says that he and Sofi have a son together shortly after Joe begins writing and illustrating the webcomic.
• Bad Job, Worse Uniform: As part of his initiation into Elan, and again after his first escape attempt, Joe is forced to wear yellow T-shirts and pink shorts.
• Becoming the Mask: Joe says in Chapter 57 that Elan has effectively institutionalized his mind and he's come to rely on their twisted moral compass. He says that the scariest part of his Elan experience was when he realized that wasn't that he was no longer pretending to be one of them — "I was one of them."
• The Berserker: Very narrowly averted. Joe comes frighteningly close to going into pure Berserker mode when he thinks Gino is going to rat him out, except Gino doesn't.
• Big Applesauce: When Joe temporarily escapes Elan, he ends up in Brooklyn. Years later, he relocates to New York City with Maria.
• Big Eater: Elan conditions its inmates to scarf down food as quickly as possible, since mealtime depravation is common as a punishment. Joe maintains these eating habits after Elan (i.e. scarf down as much food as possible without chewing), and it gives him digestive problems as an adult.
• Bookworm:
  • While on the run, Joe's narration mentions that he'd been an avid reader in his pre-Elan days, and had spent a lot of time in the library as a child.
  • Books become a source of escape for Joe in Elan after he earns the privilege of getting to read books. The books he reads include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Diary of a Young Girl, Tuesdays with Morrie, Angela's Ashes, Invisible Man, Maus, and Elie Wiesel's trilogy of Night, Dawn, and Day.
  • Later on in college, when his court-mandated random drug tests interfere with his using weed to self-medicate his PTSD, Joe finds solace in books again. In the illustration, he's seen reading The Count of Monte Cristo.
  • As an adult, Joe takes to reading books on the subway, to help alleviate his post-Elan claustrophobia and enochlophobia.
• Bully Turned Buddy: With Joe in the role as the bully; he threatens Slick Rick because he thinks Rick shorted him on a weed purchase. Joe later feels shame and apologizes for his actions, and the two later become friends.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • Joe finally does this to his mother in Chapter 66 when she threatens him with an Elan support call; he yells at her and berates her Elan-style, but it doesn't work since to an outsider it sounds like nonsensical rantings (likely by design).
  • He does this again in Chapter 75, calling them out for refusing to listen to his recurring protests about his Elan PTSD, and for putting their own selfish interests ahead of his. Or, as he calls them, "...fake, shallow, disgraces to parenthood in your show-off fucking make-believe cartoon world."
• Cannot Talk to Women: Joe as of Chapter 64. He sees a girl his age at the library and realizes that his Elan conditioning is causing him to be scared of girls his age, as looking too long at one in the "wrong" way could result in punishment. As he says, "And really, I don't mean 'normal scared', I mean post-traumatic-stress-disorder, shaking, scared." This comes back to bite him two chapters later, where he horrifies a girl at his college with small talk about "the Ring."
• Cassandra Truth:
  • When Joe has his first outing with his parents and an Elan student named Peter (who is the "Support Person" there to monitor him), Joe steals his mom's pepper spray, sprays Peter, and then tries to tell his parents about the abuse. But they refuse to listen and only berate him for being "out of control."
  • This persists even after Joe leaves Elan, and it's explained why: in their minds a widespread cover-up of Elan's abuse makes no sense, survivor testimony could be excluded since anyone could write anything on the internet, and they've made up their minds that Joe is just an ungrateful and out-of-control brat trying to manipulate them (like Elan had "warned" them would happen).
• Character Narrator: Averted since this is an autobiography. We never see the "modern day" Joe on screen (we just read his narration). Occasionally the narration will take the story into young Joe's head to show what his train of thought was at the time, but the young Joe depicted in the comic never breaks the fourth wall.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: As recounted in Chapter 66, Joe takes up chain smoking in college, and says that smoking is one of the things that helps bring him peace.
• Close to Home: Seeing a 2009 Huffington Post article about the "troubled teen" industry, along with some reader comments from a recent Elan departee, brings Joe's trauma back to the surface. After a brief Heroic BSoD, he angrily resolves to do something about Elan once and for all.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Joe to Eva, due to not having any sense of how adult relationships should work.
• Delivery Not Desired: In Chapter 70, Joe takes to drafting letters to his parents about Elan, but never sends them. He does note that just simply writing them makes him feel a little better.
• Despair Event Horizon: Because of Elan's cruelty, Joe has to overcome Despair Event Horizons over and over and over and over and over again. He hits a major point of despair when he's recaptured and abused after his escape. He despairs yet again when his parents fully buy into Elan's lie that Joe needs to stay past age 18 to "complete" the program.
• Determinator: Joe becomes this in 2009 when he makes it his life's goal to get Elan closed once and for all, and he refuses to let others' apathy or enmity stop him. However, it also causes tension in his marriage, and leads to death threats against him and his family.
• Determined Defeatist: By the end of Chapter 89, Joe has lost his marriage and his money and is living at his mother's home, almost completely obsessed with stopping Elan. He decides that since he's lost everything, he has nothing to lose, he might rally his allies and invade Elan, thinking that they could rescue kids or at least get on the national news. He starts considering taking a gun with him.
• Dirty Business: The only way to advance in Elan is to proactively treat your fellow inmates cruelly by reporting their "guilt." Like everyone else stuck there, Joe only goes along with it so he can survive and get out ASAP, and he doesn't admit it proudly; if anything, he's unhappy that he was even forced into doing it in the first place.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Following his "graudation" from Elan, Joe begins frequently drinking alcohol in what he realizes is obviously a way of trying to self-medicate the traumas he has endured during his time there.
• Drunk Driver: Joe later becomes one in college. He admits that this is a terrible idea, though, and regrets doing it.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: When Joe becomes a re-entry student, Elan gives him a part-time job doing manual labor around the campus, and tells him that they're putting his pay into a bank account. When he graduates, he doesn't get access to this account at all, if it even existed, meaning he essentially did unpaid labor for the school.
• The Dulcinea Effect: A side effect of Joe's poor social skills after he leaves Elan. He steals a pack of cigarettes from his would-be one-night stand and chucks them in the gutter, because his skewed worldview is yearning to help him "save" a potential Love Interest from an addiction, and figures they could both quit smoking as a team. The girl is understandably pissed off and freaked out by this.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • At the end of the second part, Joe swears off his post-Elan bad behaviors and focuses fully on his self-improvement, falls in love with and marries Maria, figures out a financial situation that allows him and his new wife to permanently move away from his parents, and relocates to New York City. However, this doesn't last and he later ends up divorced.
  • It does happen again after Elan closes and Joe divorces Maria. Joe spends his time traveling around the world and improving himself again, and he dates and falls in love with Sofi. In the Epilogue, Joe secures a job while making the first 86 chapters of the story (which helped his income during the COVID-19 Pandemic), they use the webcomic's Patreon support to buy a house, and he and Sofi have a son together. He also discusses forgiving his parents, and says that his mother read the comic, finally apologized for her actions regarding Elan, and commended him for saving Katie and Sandra.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The other students in Cathy's Dovetail class start calling Joe "the Mayor" after he takes charge of refuting Cathy's outdated curriculum and holds discussions about drugs.
• Fatal Attractor: Joe's narration lampshades this in Chapter 68 when he examines why he's so attracted to his drug-addicted college classmate Eva, saying that Elan's brainwashing may have subconsciously caused him to seek out Broken Birds so he can "save" them.
• Foreign Exchange Student: Joe becomes one in Chapter 76 when he begins a study abroad program in Vrátskajeki.
• Gaining the Will to Kill:
  • When Ron drags Gino in front of a general meeting to name other people's guilt, Joe readies himself to harm as many people as he can in case Gino names Joe. Gino names another kid instead and Joe gets a reprieve, but Joe notes how painful and horrifying it is that he even got to the point where he was willing to harm innocent people in order to turn himself into a liability for Elan.
  • After Joe returns home, before he goes to bed each evening, he starts keeping a baseball bat within arm's reach, as well as a lighter and a can of hairspray. As he says, "I didn't want to burn someone to death, but murder was definitely on the table if anyone ever, EVER tried to take me against my will again."
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Joe experiences this firsthand when he's forced into "the Corner," and he later watches it happen to other inmates as well. He notes that it's a torture he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, including his torturers at Elan, and that it's much worse than standard solitary confinement because anyone put in "the Corner" isn't allowed to even move.
• Happy Ending Override: Chapter 80 sees Joe getting married and moving to New York City. Subsequent chapters describe how their living and financial arrangements are less than optimal, how his obsession with taking down Elan affects his mental health, and how his marriage disintegrates.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Joe's first experiences with Elan-induced PTSD occur when he's on the run in Brooklyn. He finds that he can't sit on the inside of a restaurant booth surrounded by people without panicking. He also has a panic attack when he's in the park and makes eye contact with a young person holding a clipboard like an Elan coordinator; the person turns out to be a volunteer taking names for a petition.
  • Joe gets into a series of BSOD's after his recapture. He spends weeks in the corner, guarded by another Elan inmate, induces hallucinations through oxygen deprivation, and has a series of existential crises that cause him to go slowly mad. He also breaks down and blanks out on his 17th birthday, and receives heavy verbal abuse from Christy when he doesn't respond to her.
  • After leaving Elan, Joe's sister takes him to a house party. Joe gets overwhelmed by the noise and the partygoers, and swiftly runs out of the house and hides behind a parked car for three hours.
  • In college, Joe withdraws into a depressive spell and cries for a week after Eva breaks up with him and tells him about her abortion. His narration says that he didn't even cry like that in Elan.
  • Joe has one again years later when he reads some reader comments about Elan attached to a 2009 Huffington Post article about the troubled teen industry. Joe is so affected by these comments that it takes his wife physically shaking him to snap him out of it.
  • Joe gets interviewed (with his face blurred) for a documentary about Elan called The Last Stop. However, when he sits down to watch it, he gets a panic attack about three minutes in; he can't even bring himself to fast forward through it to his interview, as even brief snippets of Elan imagery set off his PTSD. He notes that he still can't watch it to this day.
• Hot for Teacher: In Chapter 49, as he's being berated by a female staffer from Elan 7, Joe can't help but notice how sexy she is. His narration then concedes that it's such an odd thought to have, but it only happened because he was a hormonal teenager without free access to girls or any media in Elan, much less pornography.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Joe relies on this when he's laying low in New York City. Since the city is so big, he thinks that he'll be able to blend in with the crowd. It's then frighteningly subverted when Joe is recaptured on his second day in the city (and third day on the run). To this day he still doesn't know how this was even possible, although he speculates that a bounty was issued, and that Jay Cirri had enough connections to pull it off.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: Joe drops acid in Chapter 67, and has revelations about life, death, and the relationships between life-defining moments and how daily decisions affect the course of one's life.
• Hypocrite: Joe describes himself as such in Chapter 58, although not proudly. During Ron's absence, Joe has fallen so far into Becoming the Mask that he's not only ruling Elan 8 with an iron fist, he's actively screwing over other kids in order to maintain his rank. He's doing this while concurrently befriending Gino, explaining that Gino's friendship is the only "real" thing in his life and it's like a drug, knowing full well that this kind of "contract" is explicitly against Elan's rules.
• Improperly Paranoid: Joe after graduating from Elan. On his way home, he barricades his hotel room's door, and is extremely leery of a group of middle-aged adults in the hotel's breakfast area. After he gets home, he can't bring himself to go out, and he begins sleeping with the door locked, a desk in front of the door, and with improvised weapons within arm's reach. When he drums up enough courage to walk down the street one day, he gets extremely nervous about a van pulling up close to him; he nearly goes into fight-or-flight mode until it turns out to be his close friend Chloe from before Elan.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Joe's frustration with his parents, combined with his frustration at the world's seeming indifference to the suffering and PTSD caused by Elan, leads Joe to steal a beer from a neighborhood party and buy a six pack from a convenience store.
• Innocence Lost: Joe gets hauled to Elan at 16 and loses three years of his teenage life there; when he gets out at age 19, he realizes that his friends have moved on with their lives normally, and that he missed out on experiences — like socializing or talking to girls — that a normal teenager would've and should've experienced. It also causes him to lose faith in the United States justice system, as he comes to discover that it is ignorant of, complicit in, or powerless against the systems in place that allow hellholes like Elan to operate.
• Interclass Friendship: Joe and his college friend Quiet Bill. Joe comes from an ostensibly middle class family in the American Midwest, and Bill is the son of a Los Angeles multi-millionaire. Joe finds out about Bill's background when he accompanies Bill on a trip to Los Angeles during Spring Break.
• I Should Have Been Better: One of the reasons Joe gets into a Heroic BSoD after seeing the comments about Elan on the 2009 Huffington Post article is because he feels immense guilt and anger at himself for not doing more to stop Elan, and for "allowing" it to continue running.
• It's Personal: While taking the court-mandated Dovetail drug class in college, Joe regularly uses the internet to print out info refuting Cathy's drug factoids. He mentions that this crusade becomes personal when he discovers info about the abusive anti-drug program Straight, Inc., whose abusive methods were passed down from Synanon, just like Elan's were.
• I Will Fight No More Forever: In Chapter 95, while globetrotting after his divorce, Joe mentions that he keeps up with many of the people in his "core group" involved with stopping Elan. However, he makes the decision not to join them in further pursuing former Elan leadership or fighting against other troubled teen facilities, as he wants to focus on his own healing and peace.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: At the end of Chapter 69, Joe moves out of his freshman dorm and into a new apartment; it's essentially a slum, but to him it represents freedom. He's also fully expecting to break up with Eva since her hometown is four hours away. Then he learns from Eva that she's pregnant, although she later terminates it.
• Line-of-Sight Name: When talking about Elan with a journalist, Joe refuses to give the reporter his real name until the reporter demands it. Joe chooses the name "Dave", sees the Westminister Dog Show on television, and comes up with the surname "Westminister."
• Loners Will Stay Alone: Discussed in Chapter 89, where Joe blames himself for his and Maria's initial separation (and later divorce), saying that his return to cleaning the hostel in the beach city makes his marriage feel like some kind of strange blip on the radar.
  Joe: [narrating] Like maybe my anchored life with Maria was just a tiny inconsistency and I was destined to be alone and never grounded, just wandering aimlessly, dashing away from my truama and finding new ways to self-sabotage anything that led to a real commitment in life.
• Love Makes You Dumb: Eva offers Joe a "private party" at her dorm; Joe is so infatuated with Eva that he gladly takes the 12 pills that she gives him to help him "party" (despite not knowing what they actually are). What's worse, he gets in the car with her to drive around and smoke weed while waiting for the pills to kick in. He does have enough common sense to call off the "party," take her back to her dorm, and force himself to vomit up the pills, but then the next day he calls Eva back up to go out smoking weed again. Joe's narration doesn't hesitate to point out how stupid he's acting, and he says that episode would be typical of their relationship.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: Shortly after returning home, Joe gets overwhelmed by the other young people at a house party wearing flashy clothes and having a good time. His Elan conditioning causes him to start to judge and hate everyone there based on their "image", and he comes to the (incorrect) conclusion that inmates at Elan were much more "real" without "image." A chapter later, when P comes to visit and brings some marijuana, Joe gets internally furious when his Elan conditioning goes up against a seemingly carefree world.
• Mistaken for Gay: When Joe spurns the aggressive advances of a crazy college girl who follows him home, she calls him some homophobic slurs.
• Mushroom Samba: Joe takes mushrooms on an empty stomach while going to Denver to meet up with Billy and Wilma. His ensuing bad trip causes him to flee when Diego shows up and makes him uneasy; while flying down the stairs of Wilma's building, Joe experiences time dilation, vivid flashbacks to his pre-Elan memories and feelings, and a hallucination of being murdered by cops and going to Heaven.
• My God, What Have I Done?: A downplayed example. After returning from Elan, Joe punches out his childhood bully Darren for stealing his beer and making fun of him. Joe describes it as a "humble-brag" since it only took one punch and Darren arguably had it coming, but Joe also immediately internalizes the effect this has on him personally.
  Joe: [narrating] This moment really scared me...of myself. I'd told myself to punch him if his lips touched the bottle, and that was it, it was programmed. Written in stone. Consequences be damned.
• Mysterious Informant: Subverted. This is what Joe wants to be when he starts contacting journalists to tell them about Elan School; above all else he wants to maintain his anonymity. However, he's chagrined to find out that no journalists are willing to move forward without Joe giving up his identity, something that he's not ready to do.
  Joe: [narrating] Like...what the fuck, am I not giving you people enough to start with? Stop trying so hard to figure out who I am and investigate the goddamned child abuse.
• Narrator: In the autobiographical sense, in that present-day Joe is telling his story as it happened in the past.
• Never Going Back to Prison: Or "Never Going Back to Elan School." This is what drives Joe's successful (but temporary) escape during his parental outing. After Joe "graduates," he sleeps with his door barricaded and with makeshift weapons within reach. When someone shows up banging on Joe's college dorm door while yelling about hauling Joe back to Maine, Joe grabs a baseball bat, asks his roommate Ezra to help him fight, and prepares to do battle. Elan's that bad.
• No Social Skills: This is presented almost to the point of deconstruction after Joe leaves Elan.
  • Joe has a nervous breakdown at the party his sister takes him to, which causes the party guests to laugh at him, and he finds that he's unable to talk to or be around girls his own age. His narration even explicitly mentions that Elan robbed him of "the most formative years of high school and relationships" and skewered anything he already knew.
  • Further deconstructed during Joe’s college years; his idea of trying to connect with girls is to dump his trauma onto them and apply Elan’s lessons to them, leaving them utterly terrified and/or disgusted of him. The aggression he learned at Elan, coupled with his drug habits, makes him look like a violent jerk to the guys. Both of these facts together make almost nobody wanting anything to do with Joe, isolating Joe from anyone that could have helped him deal with his baggage.
• Not Used to Freedom: After Joe is finally released, he spends most of his time in his room, partly because he's afraid of everything outside and partly because he's completely unused to deciding for himself what he wants to do.
• Online Alias:
  • When Joe begins his anti-Elan online campaign, he uses the alias "Dave Westminister" so that Elan won't be able to trace it back to him and harass or harm him. He later admits that he made up "Dave" for the webcomic, and that his actual online alias was "Jeff Wimbelton."
  • When Joe discovers Reddit, he posts under the username "gzasmyhero", which he chooses as a tribute to the GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan.
• Only Known By His Nickname: When Joe starts going after Elan in earnest after 2009, he hides his activities behind an alias so that he and his family aren't harassed by Elan acolytes (like Maura Curley was). Joe even introduces himself to Katie as "Dave." The only person who apparently learns his true name is Dee-Ray, although Gino deduces and confirms that "Dave" was Joe after Elan closes.
• Past Experience Nightmare: For years, Joe has vivid nightmares about his time at Elan. It isn't until Elan closes that he realizes in a nightmare that the school isn't around anymore, and he can walk away.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • While at Elan, Joe learns to distrust any students that speak of rebellion. Peter showing up back in his life also raises his hackles, considering their bad blood when they last interacted.
  • When Joe anonymously works to take down Elan starting in 2009, he becomes super paranoid about people on the street, strange phone numbers calling him, and even his own home potentially being broken into. However, his paranoia is not without precedent; Joe says that Maura Curley's Duck in a Raincoat mentioned that going against Jay Cirri and Elan means that you and your family aren't safe from Elan's acolytes^note Curley herself fled the country for a time after the book led to her own harassment, and Joe himself has prior experience with being located by Elan in New York City during his three days on the run.
• Roman à Clef: Joe has changed all the names in the story, including his own.
• Saying Too Much:
  • In Chapter 66, Joe goes to a freshman mixer after going off to college. He's approached by a nice-looking girl who initiates small talk; without thinking Joe eventually spirals into a conversation about Elan and "the Ring." The girl is horrified by Joe, backs away carefully, and very pointedly rushes away from him whenever she sees him on campus afterward.
  • Thirty chapters later, Joe verbal-vomits about his Elan experiences to his new love interest Sofi, fully cognizant of how this made girls avoid him in college, but unable to stop himself. However, Sofi listens to his story and expresses compassion and sorrow that he went through such an ordeal.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: During one of his call center jobs in New York, Joe is so disgusted by the center's predatory sales methods that he learns the account deletion code, quietly spends the next four days deleting people's numbers and faking sales, then leaves for good.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • Deconstructed. Joe is elated to hear about Eva's pregnancy, because his barometer for what constitutes a healthy relationship is so skewed, and he makes plans to get a ring and propose. She gradually starts ending his calls and getting harder for him to reach, so he presses on, and a couple of times drives four hours and parks outside her house.
  • Joe is also subject to the attention of a stalkerish girl who stakes out a classroom waiting for him to leave, chats him up, follows him home, sexually assults him, and snaps at Joe when he understandably spurns her advances. Both Joe's music tutor and Slick Rick tell Joe how crazy that girl is.
• Starting a New Life:
  • Joe moves away for college, then spends a year in Vrátskajeki as a foreign exchange student, learning how to live life. When he graduates college and returns home, his life at his parents' house degenerates into a living hell. Fully aware that the toxicity is eroding the positive growth he experienced while living abroad, he smokes some weed, buys a plane ticket, sells his car, and moves to a different city on the coast (to his parents' chagrin).
  • He also gets a chance to do this after marrying Maria and moving to New York City. However, his crusade against Elan prompts the two to attempt to emigrate to Italy; and when that fails, their marriage and life together falls apart, and Joe ends up back in his childhood bedroom yet again.
  • Joe and Maria briefly get back together and live in New York again, but after Elan's abrupt closure leaves Joe feeling empty, he tells Maria that he's following his gut instinct to leave her, and they divorce. He leaves New York for the beach city again.
• Stepford Smiler: Joe specifically mentions times where he'd be forced to give tours of Elan School to prospective parents, and pretend that Elan had "helped" him, and how guilty he felt about perpetuating the lie and causing further abuse, noting that it was done out of pure survival instinct.
• The Stoic: Joe learns how to be this while at Elan, as students are penalized for showing even a wisp of emotion.
• The Stoner: Becomes this after leaving Elan, as he finds that weed puts a damper on his Elan PTSD. Otherwise inverted; Joe states that he's the exact opposite of the stereotype around them, being much more active whenever he's high on weed.
• The Storyteller: In Chapter 80, Joe describes himself as this. He then wonders whether his life experiences only happened to him because it was his destiny to tell this story, or if crazy experiences are common but other people can't communicate it like he can.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land:
  • Joe returns home to find that all his friends got to finish high school and live their lives normally.
  • When Joe returns to his favorite hostel at the beach city after divorcing Maria, he feels that the same old hostel party life is too hollow and noisy for him now.
• Street Musician: He becomes one in college for a time. He later becomes one again in the New York subways to earn extra money, until he's harassed by an NYPD officer.
• The Teetotaler: In the Epilogue chapter, Joe notes that after he started working on the comic full-time he has entirely sworn off partying and drinking alcohol. He still occasionally smokes weed though.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: A downplayed and arguably deconstructed example. Right after returning from Elan, Joe finds pretty much no sympathy or comfort from his parents or law enforcement, so he starts smoking weed and drinking, because why not. Barely a year out of Elan and Joe has taken up chain smoking, alcohol, drugs, and tattoos as coping mechanisms to deal with the social stigmas and PTSD he's enduring. Effectively, the abuse, indifference, and lack of sympathy has caused Joe to fully embrace self-destructive vices; Joe's narration even points out that a year earlier he never would have imagined himself going down this path.
• Took a Level in Badass: Somewhat deconstructed. Before Elan, Joe was a quiet kid who avoided conflict, but still got bullied by Darren. After Elan, Joe stoically punches Darren for stealing the beer that Joe himself had stolen. It seems triumphant, but the act of doing so horrifies Joe.
• Too Much Information: Played for Drama. After Joe goes to college, his inability to talk to women leads to him talking about his time in Elan in great detail. This invariably freaks out the woman he’s talking to, and ultimately gets him labeled as a creepy lunatic pariah among the female campus.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Joe notices in an aside in Chapter 46 that there are some things from his time at Elan he simply cannot remember consciously. Sometimes, purely by chance, a trigger, like a sound or smell, can bring some fragment of them back, and they are usually quite horrible. Some so horrible, that he says up front that he refuses to depict them in the comic.
  Joe: [narrating] My mind has very literally blacked-out large pieces and entire chapters of my Elan life; shoved them into some pit where I can longer address them like normal memories.
• The Unfavorite: You get the sense that Joe's parents favor his sister over him. Joe doesn't ever hold it against her though, and she is one of the people he is emotionally closest to.
• Walking the Earth: In Chapter 95, Joe leaves the "beach city" for good and travels around the world, living a minimalist nomadic lifestyle while working remotely, in order to find and reinvent himself.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Joe pushes himself to succeed in college, spends two successful semesters in Vrátskajeki practicing self-care, graduates college, and returns home with a new lease on life. His parents don't acknowledge any of this, and continue not only treating him like a child, but as a child doomed to failure that they don't actually want to know anymore.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Ron escorts Joe to Elan 7 and forces him to fight another student in "the Ring," and Joe not only does it, he detaches himself and flips into full survival mode. He then annihilates the poor kid, while feeling like he'd regained control over his life. Seeing a random girl's look of disapproval and pity snaps him out of his fervor. A day later, he's promoted to a "Coordinator" position at Elan, putting him in charge of other students, turning him into one of Ron's right-hand men and making his misery worse.

The Nobody Family

Joe's parents

Mr. and Mrs. Nobody, Joe's parents, who agree to send Joe to Elan School over a drug trafficking charge, leave him there for three years after the state drops the charge, and refuse to listen to him about Elan's abuse after he leaves the school.

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• Abusive Parents:
  • They're very emotionally abusive. They're more concerned with keeping up appearances than actually parenting Joe supportively, their "solutions" are emotionally distant and self-serving at best, and they are prone to anger and argument whenever Joe goes against what they want to believe.
  • They're very controlling. When Joe returns from Vrátskajeki after graduating college and moves back in with them, they completely ignore all of his positive growth, pick fights with him, and micromanage and berate him when he tries to do right by them by cooking a meal. When he sells his car for a plane ticket to move away to the coast, his mother gives him money to buy out his plane ticket, declaring that he's "stupid" and she's "fixing his mistake." When he rebuffs her, she coldly screams at him that he's going to die, that he has no life skills, and tells him that his guitar playing is bad.
  • They're also financially abusive, threatening Joe with financial cutoff should he leave Elan on his 18th birthday, and then threatening it again after receiving his Denver hospital bill during his senior year of college.
  • Mr. Nobody comes dangerously close to being physically abusive. During Joe's escape, he's the one who strong-arms Joe, so Joe maces him. After Joe leaves Elan, Mr. Nobody lunges at Joe during an Elan argument — which Joe notes likely wouldn't have actually led to anything — and Joe reflexively knocks Mr. Nobody down.
• AM/FM Characterization: A variation. Joe says that when he was growing up, his parents never listened to the radio in the car, instead choosing to ride in dead silence.
• The Atoner: In the Epilogue, Joe says that his mother found the webcomic, apologized for her role in sending him to Elan, and congratulated him for freeing Katie and Sandra. However, this comes after 20+ years of disbelieving him and the mountains of evidence and testimony, during which Joe made several failed attempts to cut his parents out of his life entirely. However, Joe notes that his father continues to remain oblivious, and Joe doesn't want to broach the subject again since his dad has serious health problems and likely isn't long for the world.
• Because I Said So: They refuse to explain themselves when Joe calls them out for leaving him at Elan School for 3 extra years after the drug trafficking charges were dropped, and for forcing him to stay there past his 18th birthday.
• "Begone" Bribe: In Chapter 66, Joe's narration glumly says that his parents buy him a used car for college, "...surely as some kind of 'this will shut him up!' bribe."
• Beyond Redemption: As Joe says during the Chapter 80 "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, "They have no redemption arc in this story."
• Blaming the Victim: Every conversation that Joe has with them after Elan ends in a fight, because they are overwhelmingly willing to treat Joe like absolute scum and praise Elan School in the same breath. Joe's narration sums it up with a quote he heard: "Sometimes people pretend you're a bad person so they don't feel guilty about the things they did to you."
• Control Freak: They want to control Joe even after he's an adult, and they do it by way of financial abuse. They force him to stay in Elan past his 18th birthday, they threaten his college tuition multiple times, they micromanage him in "their kitchen" when he tries to cook for them after returning from Vrátskajeki, and his mother attempts to keep him at home after he graduates college by declaring that his decision to move to the coast is "stupid" and her check paying him for his plane ticket is "fixing" his "mistake".
• Conspiracy Theorist: Completely and utterly inverted. Despite the scores and scores of evidence out there about Elan's abusiveness, they dismiss it all because anyone could say anything on the internet, and refuse to believe that the hundreds of culpable people are capable of maintaining a facade of that size.
• Disappeared Dad: For a time; by the time Joe's first marriage has fallen apart and Joe is forced to live at home again, Joe's dad is living in another state. However, Joe moves in with his father in Chapter 100 after returning to the United States with Sofi.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • It's ultimately played with; Joe admits that he probably did need some kind of intervention with structured therapy as a teen, but he didn't need or deserve anything close to Elan's abuse. What happens is that Joe's parents are completely beside themselves when the police catch Joe and his friends crossing state lines with marijuana, because they're concerned with what the neighbors think. They heavily berate him, then a social worker convinces them to send him to Elan in lieu of a supposedly assured prison sentence. Then, after his charges are dropped three months into his stay, they keep him there for an extra three years to punish and "reform" him further. Joe later confronts his parents about it:
    Joe's Dad: Well, the charges were irrelevant.
    Joe: What? Dad?
    Joe's Mom: Joe, you were out of control and everyone just agreed that since you were already at Elan getting help...actually, we don't need to explain ourselves. Let the past be past.
  • At the start of Joe's senior year of college, they summon him home, and their first words to him when he walks through the door are angry outbursts about how they're cutting him off from money because of his Denver hospital bill, instead of showing actual concern about their only son having been hospitalized.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child:
  • Their relationship with Joe gets strained by the drug trafficking charge, but their sending him to Elan School for three years — combined with completely blowing off his pleas for help during the parental outing, his staph infection from Elan, and his Elan horror stories after the fact — only widens this gap. It doesn't help that P, by comparison, very quickly picks up on the fact that something very wrong happened to Joe at Elan School.
  • They don't ask him anything about his year in Vrátskajeki, where he spent a semester living in a former Soviet housing block and taking care of himself, and where he eventually graduated college. When Joe finally decides to move out of his parents' house for good, his mother tries to stop him, then angrily screams at him that he has no life skills and is going to die.
• Drama Queen: According to Joe, Mrs. Nobody "cried and dramatically nodded her head in agreement" at Ron's "map of the world" speech during Joe's graduation.
• Dysfunctional Family: Aside from Joe mentioning that their attitudes had pushed him towards rejecting religion, as well as their odd AM/FM Characterization that Joe recalls from his childhood, it's not fully known what problems the Nobody family had before Elan entered the picture; even their relationship with Joe's older sister isn't elaborated upon. But Mr. and Mrs. Nobody's anger, obstinacy, and indifference — starting from the moment Joe was caught with weed at 16 and continuing for years afterward — certainly are the main root of the family's ongoing dysfunction in the comic. This culminates in their divorce after Joe moves away permanently and they refocus their anger on each other.
• Evil Versus Evil: Up until Chapter 75, they'd appeared to have been in sync about their social status, self-righteousness, and treatment of Joe. However, they do have a big argument between themselves in Chapter 75 when Mrs. Nobody gets mad at Mr. Nobody for declaring that the last "favor" he's going to do for Joe is drop him off at the military recruiting station. By the time of the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, they've gotten divorced, which Joe surmises is because "they had no one else to project their failures onto" without him present.
• False Friend: At the beginning of Joe's senior year of college, Mrs. Nobody calmly calls Joe to invite him home to talk, and says she's making his favorite meal. It's a ruse; as soon as he walks in the door, she ambushes him with his Denver hospital bill and exclaims that they're no longer paying for college.
• Financial Abuse: They threaten to disown and cut off Joe if he checks himself out of Elan at age 18, they control his college tuition and use it as a bargaining chip, and they only relent on letting Joe study abroad in Vrátskajeki when they discover that it's cheaper than paying his tuition stateside.
• Hate Sink: They take over this role in the story not long after Joe leaves Elan, as their constant stubbornness and selfishness up against Joe's struggles leads to a very unflattering portrayal. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, Joe points out that they don't get a redemption arc.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Joe's parents thought sending him to Elan School would reform him and make him more docile; instead, it effectively ends his childhood, deprives him of a normal coming-of-age, causes emotional difficulties, and causes such severe PTSD that he gets heavy into drinking, drugs, and cigarettes to cope (the very things they were hoping to avoid).
• Hope Crusher: Anytime Joe is around them, their constant negativity manages to undo any of his optimism or growth. This is most notable right after he returns from Vrátskajeki; he returns home feeling happy and independent, but after three months he's angry, miserable, and has fallen into bad habits again.
• Hot-Blooded: Their anger with Joe seems to make them impulsively take drastic actions in the heat of the moment. They're so offended by Joe's drug charge that they refuse any kind of rational discourse about it and have him kidnapped and shipped off to Elan School for three years, and they're so offended by his Denver hospital bill that they lure him home and threaten to cut off his college tuition (which Joe says they ultimately flake out on).
• It's All About Me: It's very telling that whenever Joe's parents berate him, they keep saying, "WHAT WILL THE NEIGHBORS THINK?"
  • After his and his friends' arrests, Joe's parents are more concerned with their own public images than even trying to get him a plea deal like his friends P and B got, or listening to stories of his abuses at the hands of Elan's staff; as it turns out, they're more than willing to keep Joe in Elan even after his charges are dropped because the criminal charges are utterly irrelevant to them.
  • It's a small moment, but during Joe's escape attempt, they shout about how difficult Joe's time at Elan is...for them.
  • Shortly after Joe comes home from Elan, his parents' first priority isn't to question his staph infection from Elan, but rather to parade him in front of the neighbors at a neighborhood gathering, to show off how "well adjusted and mature" he is.
  • Joe also explains that they completely ignore his allegations of the school's abuses, calling him ungrateful for all the good things they've supposedly done for him...including sending him to Elan.
  • When he graduates college and returns from Vrátskajeki, they don't ask him anything about his time there, but go right back to treating him like a petulant child instead of a young adult with life experience. When he tries to cook for them one evening, "they micromanaged me so much in 'their kitchen' that it just ended up erupting into a huge fight."
• Knight Templar Parent: Played with and ultimately subverted; while they claim their extreme treatment of Joe is done with his best interests in mind, the reality of the situation is that they're doing it for self-serving reasons. After Joe is caught with weed at age 16, his parents berate him, throw away his music, complain about what the neighbors will think, call him a disgrace, and say "I Have No Son!". Then, after all that sturm-und-drang, they have him kidnapped and sent to Elan, and get talked into forcing him to stay at Elan past his 18th birthday lest he be formally abandoned and disowned. After Joe leaves Elan, he finds out that drug trafficking charges were dropped only three months into his Elan stay, meaning that his parents kept him there for three extra years to punish him further. Following that, they refuse to believe him about Elan's abuses, continue to treat him as a bratty child even after he graduates college, and ignore or diminish him at every turn.
• Never My Fault: They're convinced that all of Joe's problems aren't from anything that they contributed to, and that he's just an ungrateful brat. They are depicted with absolutely zero self-awareness about their role, refuse to give in to Joe's protests to the contrary, and refuse to acknowledge any of his positive growth post-Elan.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: To Maria, but it's only mentioned in passing by the narration. After Joe and Maria get married and return to the United States, they move in with Joe's parents for a very short time. It doesn't take long for things to get bad, so the newlyweds very quickly move out and relocate far away to New York City.
• Parental Blamelessness: It becomes one of their defining traits; as the story goes on, they refuse to accept any culpability for causing Joe's issues, saying that they were good parents and Joe is doing this to himself because he's ungrateful.
• Parental Obliviousness: For Joe's parents in particular, it's almost as if they want to remain ignorant of the abuse, even as everyone else sees how badly messed up Joe is, since they shut down any talk of Joe's time at the school. Joe mentions that his mother's reaction to a staph infection he brought home isn't a reasonable, "What kind of hellhole would leave my child's staph infection untreated?", but rather, "Joe, you need to get out of the house and go to a neighborhood get-together." It's so bad that he mentioned in his Reddit AMA that his parents still think he's exaggerating. However, in the Epilogue chapter, Joe says that his mother found the comic and gives him a heartfelt apology, while his father remains oblivious.
• Skewed Priorities: After receiving Joe's hopsital bill from Denver, their first priority isn't checking into the wellbeing of their son, but rather luring him home only to scream that he's cut off financially during the start of his senior year of college.

Joe's sister

Joe's kind older sister, who he regards as one of his best friends and confidants.

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• AM/FM Characterization: In a later chapter, she comforts Joe by sending him a compilation box set of The Grateful Dead.
• Babies Ever After: As of the Chapter 80 "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Big Sister Instinct: During her phone call with Joe while he's on the lam, she offers to pass along a message to Joe's friends, and tells him that she fought tooth and nail with their parents to let her talk to him. After Joe leaves Elan, she gently pushes him to go to a house party to socialize, and never pries him for information about what happened at Elan. Later on, when Joe does open up to her about Elan, she pushes him towards therapy, and sends him some Grateful Dead CD's.
• Commuting on a Bus: She comes and goes from the plot.
• The Confidant: Joe regards her as one. She's the only person he talks to on the phone when he escapes Elan, and she seems to be sympathetic to his situation. It's one of the major reasons Elan forbids Joe from talking to her. When he finally graduates Elan, it takes him over a year to finally write a letter describing to her what happened to him there.
• Cool Big Sis: Joe feels like his sister is his protector and confidante. His affection for her is weaponized by Elan; they forbid him from talking about her, forbid him from talking to her during one of his rare phone calls home, destroy all the letters she writes him, and don't invite her to his "graduation." The one time he's able to communicate with her during his ordeal is when he's on the run, when she tells him that P and B got a plea deal. She also keeps this up after he graduates Elan; she makes frequent visits from college, doesn't press him for details about what happened in Maine, gently pushes him to go to a party so he can get back to being social, and eventually encourages him to seek a therapist to process what he went through.
• No Name Given: She isn't given a name in the story; Joe only ever refers to her as "my sister."
• Satellite Character: She's only shown in her role as Joe's Cool Big Sis. There's no mention of what her relationship with their parents is like, other than when she says she argued with her parents about them forbidding her from talking to Joe at Elan, showing sympathy to Joe when he's on the run. Their parents have appeared to let her live her life normally.
• Splash of Color: When Joe first talks about her, she's shown in color, as seen in the picture here. This comes in contrast to the Deliberately Monochrome nature of the rest of the comic, showing how her presence in his life is a beacon of positivity.
• Starting a New Life: By the time Joe graduates college, he notes that his sister has moved to a different state and is starting a new life for herself. As of Chapter 80, she is married with a family, and lives across the country from Joe, but they still talk all the time.

Maria

Maria is Joe's ex-wife, who he meets in the beach city while living abroad. They marry after a year of dating, spend a few years together before separating for a time, get back together, then divorce for good.

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• Amicable Exes: Joe and Maria separate for a time, although they miss each other so much that they communicate often and eventually get back together. It doesn't last, though, and they divorce about a year after Elan closes. However, though they ultimately never see each other again, Maria still sends Joe a heartfelt email on his birthday explaining that their split was necessary, but their marriage was a wonderful time for her and she still cares for him.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Maria's reaction to Elan's closure on April 1, 2011 — a HUGE deal for Joe — is unfazed indifference. She even says she's just going to buy groceries instead of going out to eat to celebrate, as if it's any other day of the week. It's justified, though; Joe's narration notes that Maria only knew a very small part of the larger story and didn't have a grasp on how much trauma Elan caused. However, he also says that her reaction leaves him feeling very alienated.
• Foreign Exchange Student: Her reason for being overseas in the "beach city" is that she's there for a master's degree program.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Joe gets into an emotional stupor after seeing some reader comments about Elan on a Huffington Post article. Maria notices this, and tries talking to Joe, but ends up having to physically shake Joe to snap him out of it.
• Happy Ending Override: Chapter 80 sees her and Joe marrying and settling in New York City. Subsequent chapters describe how their marriage disintegrates, culminating in Joe leaving her for good in Chapter 93.
• Hot-Blooded: One of her first conversations with Joe is a heated argument. Joe later explicitly describes her as such in Chapter 83, when he discusses their living situation in New York City during the recession.
• Love Cannot Overcome: After breaking up with Maria for good, Joe considers that the problem was never with her. Even if their relationship was quite unstable at times, he admits that she didn't do anything but love him to the best of her ability, while he "thanked" her by upending her whole life in what he sees as an incredibly selfish move on his part. Joe reflects on whether the breakup was a result of his lingering Elan conditioning pushing him to pick his own freedom over the well-being of others, and even though he had a partner that sincerely loved him, it still wasn't strong enough to help break him entirely out of it.
• Love Interest: Maria becomes Joe's during the time they're in the beach city, and Joe says it's notable because hostel romances usually don't last. However, this one ends up with Maria and Joe married, and later divorced.
• Morality Chain: For a time; Joe describes her as a much-needed grounding force, and her presence in his life coincides with him giving up his bad habits (like drug dealing and substance abuse) and changing himself for the better.
• Non-Specifically Foreign: Joe says that she'd flown from "across the ocean (not from the U.S.)" for a master's degree program in the beach city. He later explicitly says that she isn't European, but she does have Italian ancestry through her great-grandfather.
• Put on a Bus: Joe divorces Maria for good in Chapter 93, where he notes that even though they were together for five years, he never saw her again. However, he later receives a birthday email from her, where she wishes him well and says that their time together was happy.
• Relationship Revolving Door: Joe and Maria's relationship starts out turbulent, and remains so throughout the story. The two break up and reconnect a couple of times, though eventually Joe breaks it off again and divorces her in Chapter 93, though this time for good, as he notes that he never saw her again after that.
• Satellite Love Interest: She shows up in the story to become Joe's girlfriend and later wife. Their relationship ultimately doesn't last.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss:
  • Maria and Joe's first real conversation is when they have a drunken screaming argument about her and her friend ditching Joe and leaving with his hostel companion. They calm down, reintroduce themselves to each other, and get into a drunken make-out session. They're inseparable after that.
  • During their marriage, their plans to emigrate to Italy fall through. They have several heated arguments and separate for a time, briefly get back together, then divorce for good.

Sofi

Sofi is Joe's second wife who he first meets in the "cold city" while traveling the world after his divorce from Maria.

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• 11th-Hour Ranger: Sofi shows up four chapters before the end of the story.
• Betty and Veronica: In Chapter 96, Sofi is the Betty; the Veronica is an unnamed girl who tries to get Joe to make a move on her even though she has a boyfriend. Joe doesn't go for the Veronica (he has empathy for the girl's boyfriend, and figures the Great Energy wouldn't approve anyway), so he ends it with her before things escalate to sex, and ultimately ends up with Sofi.
• Last Girl Wins: She's Joe's last love interest in the story, who Joe marries and is still with today.
• Love at First Sight: When Joe first sees Sofi at the dancing class, he thinks she's the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, and remarks that she is graceful and glowing. He immediately says a silent prayer.
  Joe: I've just seen my dream girl, help me find a way to make that dream come true.
• Love Interest: Joe first meets Sofi in the "cold city" after seeing her at a salsa dancing class. They go on a few dates before his visa expires, but he later returns, stays with her for two years, and marries her.
• Non-Specifically Foreign: Joe meets Sofi in the "cold city" where she's from, but there's no indication as to which country the city is in.
• Satellite Love Interest: She shows up late in the story to become Joe's love interest.
• Second Love: Sofi and Joe meet, date, get together, and marry some time after Joe's divorce from Maria.
• Splash of Color: She is depicted in full color, with none of the comic's original black-and-white tones.

Elan School staff

In General

• Can't Take Criticism: To the point that the staff keeps a file folder called "Former Students / Negative Posting" where they collected details about former students trying to expose the school's abuses. Joe includes a photograph of this folder to show that he's not making this up.
• Evil Teacher: Zig-zagged. The school's administrators know exactly what they're doing perpetuating abuse and torture, but they don't care. Any hired staff from outside Elan (like tutors) either don't know the full extent of the abuse, know about it and do what they can to help the kids, or are fired after raising objections.
• Evil Versus Evil: The infighting between Ron and Christy gets a lot of attention. Ron is maybe slightly better in that he's somewhat less sadistic and slightly more reasonable than Christy, but he still directly participates in most of the abuse at Elan.
• Hot for Student: Many of the staff are ex-students who are just barely older than the current students; Joe mentions several rumors of male staffers having inappropriate relationships with female students, and one rumor of a female staffer having an inappropriate relationship with a male student.
• Hot Teacher: Joe can't help but notice that one of the Elan 7 staffers berating him during the three-house general meeting is pretty hot. He chalks it up to teenage hormones and his complete lack of access to media.
• Just Giving Orders: Discussed in Chapter 56. Joe mentions that Elan's staff usually ordered kids to brutalize each other, and never directly manhandled students, in order to maintain plausible deniability.
• Sadist Teacher: Joe says that many of the Elan staff — usually ex-students with no teaching or psychology certifications of any kind — got off on abusing the inmates.
• Slut-Shaming: Part of Elan's modus operandi. Any contact between girls and boys, no matter how benign, is forbidden; and if a girl gets caught, the program makes an example out of her through slut shaming. Christy also tells the girls in Katie's dorm that they'll become prostitutes if they don't learn how to properly clean.
• There Are No Therapists: All of Elan's "therapies" are handled by students and staff who have no professional qualifications of any kind. Chapter 11 explicitly mentions that the attack therapy wasn't overseen by any licensed professionals.
• Token Good Teammate:
  • At his graduation, Joe invites an unnamed teacher to speak, who had "made a real effort to add something of value to our dull, miserable lives" by actually teaching, unlike other teachers contracted by the school.
  • Jerry went out of his way to make the students' situations more bearable, but according to Joe was fired after eight months for being "too nice."
• Wardens Are Evil:
  • Ron and Christy stand out as the most abusive to Joe during his time at Elan 8.
  • During the three-house general meeting in Chapter 49, Joe gets berated by the adult staff from Elan 3 and Elan 7.
  • Joe also talks about senior staff members named Meredith, Caesar, and Larry, all of whom he admits he's still terrified of to this day.
  • At the very top is Jay Cirri, who runs the school and once participated in its "therapy," but is more The Man Behind the Man by the time Joe gets there.
  • After Cirri's death in 2001, his widow Sara Tarron becomes its new owner, and continues running and profiting from the school the same way Jay did.
• Weirdness Censor: Played for Drama and lampshaded in Chapter 60, when Joe's narration notes that Elan's maintenance men, nurse, gym teacher, schoolteachers, and head cook are all completely oblivious to the school's abuses.
• Worst Aid: Elan's staff refuse to give any of its inmates any proper medical care.
• Would Hurt a Child: The staff are pretty hands-off when it comes to physical abuse — and leave it primarily to the inmates — but they do frequently order it, are extremely emotionally abusive on top of it, and ultimately profit off of it.

Ron

Ron is an Elan staff member, one of Elan's first graduates in The '70s, and one of Jay Cirri's unofficial right-hand men. He oversees Elan 8, Joe's house, with an iron fist.

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• Affably Evil: Ron is a particularly dark example. He psychologically tortures kids under the twisted belief that he's helping them and happily crushes them when they step out of line. In spite of that, Joe notes that he can be surprisingly personable and friendly so long as you play his game; and he's able to charm unsuspecting parents with ease. Joe even compares him to a charismatic cult leader whose larger than life presence helps keep the operation running smoothly.
• Beard of Evil: The comic depicts him with a beard during his time ruling Elan 8 and making everyone's lives hell. Then he disappears from Elan for a while, and when he returns and has a possible Heel–Face Turn, he's clean-shaven.
  • Subverted with one of teenage Joe's drawings of Ron from shortly after Joe leaves Elan. Ron is shown ranting and raving to the house (per the norm), but he's depicted without a beard.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Joe lists several of Ron's abuses, and says he's a complete psychopath, "...but when that man was on your side you really felt something special." During Joe's parents' first visit he's amicable and personable to Joe's parents, but when they leave the room, Ron smugly tells Joe that he thinks Joe's dad is a closet homosexual and that his mother is a slut. The final irony is Ron's giving a speech at Joe's "graduation" that Joe's mother finds so touching that it sends her into dramatic hysterics; and his last words to Joe are a hollow, "You are enough."
• Bully Turned Buddy: For Gino of all people; Gino tells Joe that he and Ron are planning to hang out in Las Vegas, then later tells Joe that he's in some kind of "business" arrangement with Ron.
• The Bus Came Back: Ron leaves Elan for an extended period of time, and newer residents of Elan 8 come to think of him as some kind of ghost story. Then Ron returns to Elan, clean-shaven and strung out, and tries to get Joe to leave with him. After a shouting match with Christy, and a general meeting with Gino that goes nowhere, Christy tells Joe that he's "graduating."
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: A major part of Elan's "therapy" is the constant reminder that if you don't complete the program, you'll end up as a drug addict. Yet Ron, a graduate of Elan in the 1970s, shows up to quell the Elan 8 riot with fresh track marks on his arms; Joe surmises that Ron had been shooting up when the call about the riot came in.
• Co-Dragons: Joe mentions that Ron is the unofficial fourth member of the group of former Elan inmates who administer the school, second only to Jay Cirri.
• Color-Coded Eyes: In a comic that is primarily Deliberately Monochrome, Ron's eyes are consistently brown.
• Even Evil Has Standards: During one of Joe's Heroic BSODs, he's completely blanked out and doesn't respond to Christy yelling at him. She immediately orders to other kids to hog-tie Joe and call a general meeting; Ron then intervenes, calls them off, and sends Joe back to the corner instead to cope.
• Heel–Face Turn: Ron, seemingly. Towards the end of the story, a strung-out Ron shows back up at Elan after having been missing for months, and attempts to get Joe to escape with him. However, Joe doesn't buy it for a second — he has plenty of bad history with Ron, and knows that Ron is a Manipulative Bastard who could be "testing" him, and knows how Elan loves to move the goalposts with regard to a "graduation" date to continue conning parents out of money — so Joe refuses. Ron then storms into Christy's office and gets into a shouting match about how Joe should be allowed to leave.
• Just Giving Orders: Subverted when Ron directly manhandles a student during the Elan 8 riot, and says that it makes no sense, "...like the Mafia godfather with a gun in his hand, robbing a little corner store."
• Just the First Citizen: Ron has a role in the Elan School hierarchy comparable to this. Officially, he's just another counselor. Unofficially he's one of Jay Cirri's four second-in-commands. He just keeps his lower rank so he can be more hands on with the students.
• Knight Templar: What makes Ron so dangerous is that not only is he a graduate of Elan like the kids (and has more insight into their mindset) but he also sincerely believes in the program. Even as he rakes in cash from their misery he's completely convinced that he's building them up to succeed.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In a fashion. After Elan closes, Joe has an Elan nightmare where Ron tells Christy that Elan is done for good.
  Dream Ron: Give it a rest, Christy! It's over. Can't you see that? Didn't we always tell them, "What goes around comes around"? Well, it's come back around on us... This is the way of the world.
• Koan: At Joe's graduation, Ron tells a story about a boy who is given a puzzle showing a map of the world, and completes it in no time flat; when asked how, the boy says that the back of the puzzle had a picture of a man, "...and when I put the man together, the whole world just fell into place." It's a nice sentiment meant to show how building a person into a responsible adult will open up the world for them (which Mrs. Nobody dramatically accepts at face value), but it makes absolutely no sense in light of how Elan School gives its alumni no actual preparation for the outside world, and how it leaves its alumni — including both Joe and Ron himself — with real, lasting issues. Years later, Joe discovers that this anecdote originated from a speech that Jay Cirri had once given.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: When Joe's parents come to visit him in Elan, as soon as they leave the room, Ron makes some snide homophobic and sexist remarks about them.
• Renaissance Man: Supposedly; in addition to his work at Elan, Joe notes that Ron often made claims about being a good investor, being a Hollywood silent partner and producer, and being the inventor of some kind of "neon conversion" that is used in neon signs around the country. Joe also notes that Ron might have been full of shit, but at the same time his claims were oddly specific; in any case the man was definitely "filthy, multi-millionaire rich."
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: A downplayed example, but Gino tells Joe that Ron has homes all over the country, "...and crazy fucking connections."
• The Svengali: More or less becomes one to Gino, grooming him with gifts, books, and personal attention during Gino's time in Elan, and eventually turning Gino into what looks like a drug runner and possible Elan recruiter.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In the Epilogue chapter, Joe notes that Ron eventually passed away just before turning 71, while Joe was still in the process of writing and publishing the comic. Joe admits that, in spite of everything, a part of him still feels sorry for Ron, who he ultimately sees as Elan's worst victim, and he hopes that Ron was able to find some semblance of peace in his final years.
• Villain Takes an Interest:
  • In Joe. He gradually "befriends" Joe in Elan, then later attempts to get Joe to leave Elan with him, and gets into a spat with Christy over Joe's graduation date. On Joe's graduation date, he gets Joe alone and declares that he's going to keep in touch and they'll be lifelong friends. During Joe's senior year of college, Gino says that Ron sometimes asks Gino about Joe, which makes it somewhat alarming when Joe doesn't hear from Gino again "for a very long time" after Joe refuses to go visit Ron with him.
  • To a lesser extent, Gino, who becomes one of Ron's buddies and flunkies thanks to Gino's lingering Stockholm Syndrome. During Gino's time in Elan, Ron grooms Gino with gifts, books, and personal talks, causing Gino to bond with him, which eventually leads to some kind of nebulous business arrangement after Gino graduates. Joe doesn't have the heart to tell Gino that Gino's experience with Ron happened almost exactly the same way it did with Joe, with the only difference being that Joe couldn't stand the thought of Ron after Elan.

Christy

Christy is a cruel Elan staffer who oversees Joe at Elan 8, and Joe utterly despises her.

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• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: On Joe's graduation day, Christy berates and threatens him an about an hour before giving an impassioned speech about how Joe is a "hero" and a "shining example."
• The Bus Came Back: Christy shows up again in Chapter 88, when she berates the girls in Katie's house for not dusting the light covers.
• The Caligula: Christy rules over Elan 8 with abject sadism. She severely punishes any kind of perceived slight against her; at one point she screams to have Joe hogtied while he's ignoring her during a Heroic BSoD, and she later goes on a sexist diatribe and denies breakfast to Katie's group for not dusting the light covers well enough. She orders the staff to read and destroy any letters from Joe's sister in front of Joe after deducing that Joe is close with his sister. She also abuses her authority by constantly putting off Joe's graduation date in order to force Joe to stay at Elan as her stooge. However, Joe notes that she completely shuts down with a "dumb, helpless, confused look on her face" when two high-strength students take down John during a house riot.
• Fat Bastard: She's depicted as an overweight woman, and she's incredibly cruel to Joe and Katie.
• For the Evulz: Joe notes that, unlike Ron, Christy never went through the Elan program in any form, implying that her wanton cruelty is just for cruelty's sake.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Katie describes Christy as both of these contained in a single person. Christy goes from screaming abuse at the girls in Katie's house, to calmly telling them that it's for their own good.
• Green and Mean: Christy is usually seen with green eyes.
• Hate Sink: While there's a number of detestable people running Elan, Christy's cruelty gets a lot of attention, and Joe even introduces her by saying that he'd "grow to truly despise" her. She's one of the heads of Elan 8, and she directly causes much of the hardship that Joe endures, while characters like Cirri and other higher-ups are so far away that Joe only really understands the depths of their cruelty after the fact. Christy's actions are contrasted with Ron's — Ron is a man who's much more directly vicious, but who Joe ends up befriending to a degree; and even though Joe still hates him, he admits that Ron shows him more respect than Christy ever did. It's ultimately Christy who extends Joe's stay at the school, which Ron objects to because Christy had became reliant on Joe to do her dirty work. At the end of his time at Elan, Joe is allowed to invite staff members to speak at his graduation; he invites Ron, whilst Christy invites herself.
• I Shall Taunt You: Shortly after Christy is introduced in the comic, she's seen with Ron taunting Joe about being The Unfavorite compared to his sister in order to elicit a reaction, and further taunting him when he flips out after Nathan accuses Joe of attempting to organize an escape. Taunts like this become normal for her.
• Mooching Master: Downplayed; Christy makes a big deal about Joe becoming a "full coordinator," then later a "re-entry" student, but in reality she only does it to force Joe to stay longer and run Elan 8 for her without being paid for it. Ron (of all people) eventually returns to call her out for turning Joe into her slave.
• Moving the Goalposts: Christy continually prolongs Joe's stay at Elan because she wants to keep him running Elan 8 as her lackey. It takes Ron directly calling her out for it and threatening to "go to the top" to get her to finally schedule Joe's graduation date, which she constantly holds over Joe's head.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: When Christy is seen in Katie's chapter, she denies Katie's dorm breakfast for not correctly dusting the lampshades, makes sexist remarks by yelling about how girls are "supposed to be better than the boys at these things," then rants about how the girls will all end up as irredeemable prostitutes if they don't comply with her demands.
  Christy: Listen girls, I only want the best for you. Dirty boys grow up to become drug addicts but they can sometimes find a way to beat that, they can be whole again. Afterwards, they can be clean again. It's forgiven. Do you get that? But you know what dirty girls become? PROSTITUTES! And you think there's any coming back from THAT? Huh?
• Shame If Something Happened: Christy tells Joe about his graduation in three weeks, then immediately reminds him, "Anything can happen in Elan, don't forget who is in charge. I'll have my eye on you." She then continues these veiled threats every single day up to his graduation date, and Joe knows the implications.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Even though Joe tells the fates of Ron and Sara in the Epilogue chapter, Christy's fate after Elan isn't discussed at all.

Jay Cirri

The owner of Elan School, a former hoodlum turned businessman who made his multi-million dollar fortune off of decades of child abuse at Elan.

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• Asshole Victim: When Joe meets Cirri, he notices that Cirri appears to be sick and in pain, so much so that he doesn't acknowledge Joe, or even register Joe's presence. Cirri would eventually die of cancer in January 2001 at age 54.
• The Caligula: Joe quotes people interviewed for the book Duck in a Raincoat that described Cirri as a charismatic leader who was revered as a god at Elan, who was also incredibly mercurial. If you ever slighted him, he would punish you severely.
• Disappeared Dad: Jay's father abandoned Jay's mother while she was pregnant with Jay, but still lived one town over.
• Drunk with Power: Joe describes Cirri as such in Chapter 47, saying that Cirri had built Elan as some kind of warped reflection of his own sick mind, and comparing the man to "one of those ancient Roman emperors that become drunk off of power and go off the rails...but there was absolutely nobody around to stop him."
• Empty Shell: Three weeks from graduation, Joe finally meets Cirri while doing manual labor on his estate, only to find that the man looks lost and confused, and is very visibly sick — although Joe grimly notes that Cirri is still surrounded by a very evil air.
• Freudian Excuse: Presented in Cirri's backstory. Jay's father, a hellraising biker nicknamed "Bamboo," abandons Jay's mother when she's pregnant, and not long after she gives birth, she relinquishes custody to Jay's grandparents.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Cirri is this for most of the story, and Joe goes over why in Chapters 46 and 47. Cirri started out as a petty thug and addict, learned abusive "therapies" from the Synanon-inspired Daybreak Village in the Sixties, then founded Elan School based off of these "therapies." By the time of the story has spent over twenty years bilking parents and state governments out of millions while convincing them that problematic children need his school. He's so intimidating, and has so much clout, that a highway trooper turns a blind eye to Joe's second kidnapping upon hearing Cirri's name.
• Hate Sink: Joe has absolutely no problem vilifying Cirri. Cirri started out as a petty thug, got roped into the Synanon-inspired Daybreak Village in the Sixties, and walks away with it with enough knowledge of its methodology to co-found Elan School. From Elan, Cirri rakes in millions of dollars in tuition fees at the expense of the children's well-being, and personally oversaw its earliest punishment methods, which included horrors like dumping buckets of human waste on its residents. Joe alleges that Cirri burned down several buildings he owned at Elan and at his racetrack to collect the insurance money, drove his wife to a breakdown that required a hospital stay, and has enough clout in the Maine political scene to keep law enforcement at bay. Even after Cirri dies, Joe still hates him.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Jay Cirri is depicted with icy blue eyes in flashbacks to his past. However, when Joe meets him later on, Cirri's eyes are colorless and lifeless to reflect that he's become an Empty Shell.
• Insurance Fraud:
  • Joe also recounts two stories from Duck in a Raincoat about how Elan's original headquarters burned down in 1974, then how in 1983 the clubhouse at Cirri's racetrack burned down. Both times, Cirri had invested in fire insurance shortly beforehand. In the latter case, the fire happened on the same night the racetrack's phones and hydrants weren't working; Cirri gets heavily investigated for fraud, but ultimately gets the payout.
  • Joe quotes another anecdote from Duck in a Raincoat about how Cirri sued his fiancee Sherry's insurance company for injuries supposedly sustained in a minor auto accident after Sherry ran a red light in 1969. The insurance company settled with Cirri even though Sherry didn't think that Jay had been injured at all, and he used the payout to buy her an engagement ring.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Legally speaking, Cirri never faced any punishment for what he did to all the kids who suffered through Elan School, or for that matter all the stuff he did before Elan. However, he died of cancer at the relatively young age of 54, and suffered from dementia for a few years before passing.
• Killed Offscreen: Cirri ends up dying in 2001, leaving behind a fifteen million dollar estate. Joe doesn't find this out until researching Elan around 2009.
• The Man Behind the Man: Jay is at the top of the Elan totem pole, profiting off of child abuse.
• Nature Versus Nurture: Joe talks about Jay's father "Bamboo", saying that the man was a biker who earned his nickname due his toughness in bar fights. Joe then says that "the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree" with Jay, who was himself a hellion as an adolescent.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: A variation; as part of the Roman à Clef nature of the comic, Joe has renamed him. But the comic doesn't exactly try to hide that "Cirri" is supposed to be the real-life Elan owner Joseph Ricci.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!:
  • Joe goes into detail about this in Chapter 46, quoting a former Maine parole officer who was told to keep quiet about Elan. Joe also quotes a passage from the book Duck in a Raincoat that describes how Cirri got out of insurance fraud charges when buildings he owned mysteriously burned down right after he'd taken out insurance policies.
  • Mentioned again in Chapter 81 when Joe surmises that journalists who already know about Elan School won't touch the topic with a ten foot pole because of Cirri's lingering influence.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Peter tells Joe that Cirri pretty much owns Poland, Maine, "...cops and everything."
• The Svengali: Implied; in a flashback to The '70s, Joe depicts Cirri as offering a young Ron — one of Elan's first inmates, under Cirri's direct tutelage — riches in exchange for becoming one of his Elan mooks.
• Tomato Surprise: Towards the end of his stay at Elan, Joe is forced to do manual labor at Jay Cirri's estate, and eventually comes face-to-face with the Greater-Scope Villain himself. Despite spending the entire story thinking that Cirri is pulling the strings behind the scenes, Joe instead finds that Cirri is instead a very sickly Empty Shell with dementia.
• Unknown Rival: Arguably Joe for Jay, given the comic's title. Jay is Elan School's founder and head honcho, but only meets Joe once, and is so sick and deep in dementia at this point that he doesn't even register Joe's presence.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • During the first part of the story, Cirri is seen as a pillar of the state for his "good work" with Elan School. He's also well-known enough to warrant a run for Maine state governor, although he loses the primary. The only truly damning portrait of him is Maura Curley's 1991 book Duck in a Raincoat, which Joe comes to discover had a very low print run.
  • In the third part, however, Joe finds that this good publicity lasted even after Cirri's death in 2001. To his disgust, he sees that the Maine legislature had a "Jay Cirri Day" and paid homage to him with speeches.
    State Representative: [Jay] had the foresight to found Elan. A special adolescent treatment center designed not only to get young people off drugs and alcohol and other substances, but also to prepare them for a productive adult life. [...] [He] was a man of tireless energy who enlivened our lives and left Maine just a little bit better for it. We will all miss him.
    Joe: [narrating] Speak for yourself, fuckstick, I wish he'd never been born.
• The Unfought: Though he builds up Cirri as the main villain behind Elan School, Joe doesn't oppose Cirri himself at any point during the story; rather, Joe's work to take down the Elan School begins about eight years after Cirri's death. The only time Joe meets Cirri, the man is sick and addled, and Joe is in no position to oppose him anyway.

Sara Tarron

Sara is Jay Cirri's widow, who inherits his estate and becomes the new owner of Elan School when Jay dies.

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• Big Bad: Effectively becomes this in the third section of the story, when Joe discovers that Jay died in 2001, and Sara is keeping Elan School open as her own cash cow.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: She was never directly involved with Elan School; she was just Jay Cirri's secretary. When he is dying from cancer and no longer mentally competent, she convinces Cirri to marry her, and two days before his death she has him sign an amended will leaving 100% of his estate to her. Upon his passing she fights tooth and nail to cut Cirri's children out of the inheritance in order to keep all of it for herself, and keeps Elan School running to continue living off of its hefty profits.
• Gold Digger: Joe alleges that Sara is this, marrying Cirri for his fortune, then swindling her way into inheriting every red cent of his multi-million dollar estate upon his passing.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Legally speaking, Sara also never faced any punishment for her role in continuing Elan's abuse or swindling Cirri's heirs out of his estate. However, Joe notes that she dies after years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and spends her last years of lucidity watching her cash cows — Elan School and Scarborough Downs — implode before her eyes.
• Meet the New Boss: She's just as much of a scoundrel as Jay ever was. She marries him about a year before his passing, swindles him into signing a new will naming her as 100% inheritor of his fifteen million dollar estate — two days before his passing, while he's incoherent on his deathbed, no less — and uses her wealth to successfully fight his other heirs in court. She also keeps Elan School open so she can continue to live comfortably off of the suffering of children.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: As with "Jay Cirri", Joe has renamed Sara for the story. However, it's not hard to deduce that she's supposed to be Sharon Terry, Joseph Ricci's wife, who inherited Ricci's estate — including Elan School — after his death.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: She's able to use her inherited riches to successfully fight off legal challenges from Cirri's other heirs, and Joe is all too happy to point out that this occurs in the same state with the same kinds of lax laws that have allowed Elan to operate unimpeded in the first place. However, it isn't enough to deter the Internet Counterattack that Joe starts, and she ultimately closes Elan School.
• Unknown Rival: Arguably Joe for Sara after Jay Cirri dies. By the time Joe starts actively working to bring down Elan School, Cirri has been dead for eight years, and Sara is running and profiting from Elan in his place. However, Joe refuses to let anyone know his identity, knowing full well that Sara — and by extension, the rest of Elan's most ardent supporters — would use their connections to actively harass or harm him and his family to preserve their cash cow and cover up the school's abuse. Eventually the school shuts down without Sara ever apparently learning Joe's identity.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Joe notes with disgust that Sara rececived a "distinguished service award" and standing ovation at Scarborough Downs, the racetrack that she inherited when Cirri died.

Meredith, Caesar, and Larry

Meredith, Caesar, and Larry are three high-ranking staff members at Elan, who Joe admits he's still terrified of to this day.

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• The Announcer: Elan higher-up Caesar is, in Joe's words, a "whole other level of creepy" example of this. He shows up for every house "Ring" event, and gleefully acts as the "in this corner" announcer.
• Bad Boss: Ron threatens Christy that he'll to go to "the top" — meaning these three — to get Joe to graduate, knowing that Christy would be intimidated by the threat. Katie later says that "even Christy didn't dare get in [Meredith's] way."
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Meredith cusses up a storm when Katie's mom shows up in a two-seater Smart car, then puts on a cheery facade to go talk to her.
• The Bus Came Back: Meredith makes an appearance in Chapter 88, when she summons Katie to the Elan staff office to tell her that her aunt is in the hospital and that she's going to get a 24-hour excursion with an SP. She then appears in some Imagine Spots in Chapter 91, as Joe imagines Sandra's mom ignoring Meredith's calls, and imagines Meredith and Sara finding out about the online anti-Elan campaigns.
• Co-Dragons: The three are senior directors at Elan who are second only to Jay Cirri.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Joe describes Larry as giving off this vibe. More specifically, Larry's vibe was described as "sociopathic Wall Street trader who'd slit his mother's throat to get ahead."
• The Man Behind the Man: Ron is outranked by Meredith, a senior director and former Elan resident who Joe thinks is angling for Jay Cirri's role as head honcho.
• Remember the New Guy?: In Chapter 61, right before his "graduation" from Elan, Joe talks briefly about these three characters, who'd apparently been around for a while but hadn't been mentioned in the story before then. That said, it's entirely possible that Caesar was the Ring announcer during Joe's first Ring back in Chapters 19 and 20, since the announcer character in those chapters isn't clearly depicted or named.
• Sadist Teacher: Caesar is a senior director, but makes it a point to show up at every Elan Ring and act as the "announcer". And Joe says he does it enthusiastically.

Billy Crowe

Billy Crowe is Joe's cross-country running coach at Elan.

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• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Crowe acts like he's a gangster from the South Bronx, and that rival schools' teams are rival gangs. Joe points out that Crowe was actually born and raised in Maine.
• Small Role, Big Impact: His role in the story isn't very large, but he does get Joe involved with Elan's running team. Joe then keeps up with running even after leaving Elan; he runs to alleviate his stress and depression in college, and later on he routinely runs for exercise and exploration while traveling the world.
• Training from Hell: Crowe knows how strict Elan is by controlling its students' compliance and access to the outside world, and uses that to his advantage, regularly pushing the kids in his charge past their breaking points knowing full well that they don't have a choice. Joe even links to a Runner's World article written by a female Elan survivor who was brutalized by the real life "Crowe's" methods.

Jerry

Jerry is a former teacher at Elan, who Joe regarded fondly, but was fired for being "too nice." Joe and Gino meet up with him about a year after Joe graduates.

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• I Should Have Been Better: Jerry tearfully apologizes to Joe and Gino, saying that he was fully aware that Elan School was "a horror show," and that he'd been sucked in and forced to go along with the abuse just like everyone else.
• Put on a Bus: Lampshaded. Joe's narration specifically says that he's thankful that he got a chance to hug Jerry and tell him that what he did mattered, because Joe never sees Jerry again after that.
• Remember the New Guy?: Jerry was never mentioned during the Elan chapters; he's only introduced during Chapter 69 when Joe and Gino drive up to Poland, Maine.
• Token Good Teammate: Jerry is one of the only former Elan staffers — if not the only one — who Joe says he'd be happy to see again. Jerry went out of his way to make the students' situations more bearable, but was fired after eight months for being "too nice."

Elan School inmates

In General

• All Crimes Are Equal:
  • Joe notes that there were a wide gamut of reasons why kids were put into the Elan School. You had genuinely dangerous juvenile delinquents mixed in with kids like Joe who had minor legal charges, kids who had talked back to their parents, kids from strict religious families, kids like Julian who were dumped there by an uncaring foster system, or kids like Katie and Sandra who were put there supposedly because they needed "structure." Regardless of the reasons why anyone was there, though, the program's brutal "therapy" was exactly the same for all inmates, and was not tailored to their individual situations.
  • Within Elan, any supposed transgressions can potentially get students "shot down" to the lowest rank, regardless of the severity of the action.
• Evil Feels Good: Discussed. Joe surmises that many of Elan's staunchest defenders were probably okay with the abuse because it gave them power over others when they didn't have any previously.
• Expelled from Every Other School: Many of the inmates at Elan School were kicked out of other programs for being too unruly.
• False Friend: A common way to win favor at Elan is to coordinate an escape with another student, then rat them out. This seems to happen often.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: When Joe is dragged before a three house Ring, he and the other students hear the horrified screams from a girl who had just arrived at Elan that very day. He imagines how absolutely awful it must've been for her to be kidnapped, stripped and deloused, then thrown into watching this general meeting with no context to see a person get berated and beaten to a bloody pulp.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Many Elan inmates fall into alcohol and drugs after Elan, as a coping mechanism.
• Locked Out of the Loop: A lot of Elan's machinations are kept hidden from these kids. Of note is the kid who Gino is an SP for, who endures 14 months of cycling between the corner and the Ring, before Elan quietly shuffles him into isolation, rewards him with Begone Bribes, and then kicks him out; Gino notes that it was such a tightly controlled secret because the school didn't want other kids to try it.
• Moral Myopia: Discussed at length. In order to survive, Elan inmates — Joe included — adopt a general strategy of watching out for themselves first. This involves perpetuating the abuse to keep themselves out of trouble; Joe mentions on multiple occasions that his coordinator role required him to abuse other students. He doesn't state any of this proudly, though, and explains his immense guilt at being forced to take part in this cycle.
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Joe refuses to go into detail about what caused some of his classmates' deaths, but does what he can to speak positively about them as he knew them in life.
• No Name Given: The second "tragic death" that Joe mentions is not named.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Joe doesn't go into detail about what caused their deaths out of respect, other than the implication that the trauma from Elan School led directly to them.
• Properly Paranoid: All Elan really does is convince anyone that rebellion is met with extreme punishment, including a full demotion of any "status" that was achieved. To that end, no one trusts anyone.
• Remember the New Guy?: Several of these people are brought into the story when Joe reunites with them after leaving Elan, but weren't mentioned in the Elan chapters proper. In particular, Randall and Eliza are first mentioned in Chapter 68; and Billy, Wilma, Melanie, Vinny, and Diego are first introduced in Chapter 73. It's also possible that the second tragic death wasn't mentioned during the Elan chapters, either.
• Sadistic Choice: Every day for the inmates. Typically the choice is between "help brutalize your peers" or "get severely brutalized yourself."
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: There's a strong implication that the trauma of Elan's "rehabilitation" led directly to the deaths of Joe's classmates. Poor Eliza in particular was out of Elan less than a year before her death at age 19, and Joe mentions that Wilma had never done drugs before Elan.
• The Stoic: Even the tiniest wisp of emotion is penalized at Elan, and one of the first things that Joe notices about the other inmates is how "blank" many of their faces are.
• Teens Are Monsters: Enforced by Elan; for most students it becomes a survival mechanism, but a handful had already done monstrous deeds before being sent there.

Gino

Gino is a snarky young man from Staten Island, just a few months younger than Joe, who is first introduced in Chapter 54 as a new Elan student. Shortly after the Elan 8 riot, Joe makes friends with Gino, breaking one of Elan's cardinal rules about "contracts" between inmates. The two later keep in touch after Elan, with Gino often dropping in to visit Joe.

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• Addled Addict: In Chapter 85, Joe's narration strongly insinuates that Gino does drugs after excusing himself to the bathroom for a really long time; he spends part of their cab ride passed out. He eventually dies from a drug overdose in Chapter 98.
• Axes at School: The reason Gino is sent to Elan is because he was caught carrying a gun to scare some bullies who had robbed him.
• Back for the Finale: He leaves the story after Joe refuses to go with him to visit Ron, and doesn't show up again until the first "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80. He continues making appearances after that, however.
• Because You Were Nice to Me:
  • Strongly implied that this is why he doesn't rat on Joe during Ron's general meeting, as Joe didn't name Gino's "guilt" unlike the other kids who Gino had made "contracts" (i.e. forbidden friendships) with.
  • It's also the reason Gino befriends and starts working for Ron, too, by way of Stockholm Syndrome. When Gino tells Joe about how his relationship with Ron changed during Gino's stay at Elan, Joe recognizes it as the exact same way Ron became chummy with him, too. Joe doesn't have the heart to tell Gino about how messed up he thinks it is.
• Befriending the Enemy: In Chapter 72, Gino tells Joe that he's on his way to Las Vegas to party with Ron; Joe is so shaken by this statement that he has no response. Gino later shows up again and says that he's gone into business with Ron, which Joe observes is likely selling drugs. According to the Chapter 80 "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, Joe says that Gino travels around with Ron; a few chapters later, Joe does an internet search and finds that another Elan survivor had accused Gino of being a recruiter for Elan.
• Big Applesauce: Gino originally hails from Staten Island. As of the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, however, Joe says that Gino left New York and primarily lived in another major metropolitan area.
• Big Bad Friend: Joe and Gino stay in touch, and Joe later calls him "my best friend." However, their relationship is strained when Gino keeps working for Ron, and when Joe sees an online accusation that Gino may be an Elan recruiter. This eventually culminates in Gino's ambiguous reaction during their last conversation, when Gino looks "almost like he was angry and proud at the same time" after Joe admits to being "Dave Westminister." However, after Gino's death, Joe decides not to investigate, and chooses to simply remember Gino as his friend.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Gino shows up at Joe's dorm at the end of Chapter 68, and they go back to Maine together in the following chapter. Gino also shows up a handful of times after that, and gets a mention in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
  • Gino later reappears again in Chapter 84 after the first "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, when he calls Joe from an unknown number and asks to meet up. Joe mentions that they hadn't seen each other since before Joe went to Vrátskajeki.
• Character Depth: Joe discusses this in relation to Gino, saying that he merely wrote about Gino as he knew him, but that he never expected Gino to come alive so vibrantly for the audience.
  Joe: [narrating] It was like... that happened beyond me. It's like, I simply drew the character and his spirit did the rest. So it definitely feels like Gino has been with me through [this webcomic] too. And I'm so glad he was.
• The Confidant:
  • Against Joe's better judgement, Gino — who openly sees through and rejects Elan's bullshit — becomes Joe's confidant within Elan. Joe acknowledges that his need for Gino's confidence is almost like an addiction, as it's one of the only "real" friendships he makes in Elan. This almost comes back to bite Joe when Gino starts naming people who'd confided in him, although Gino ultimately doesn't name Joe.
  • Averted when Joe begins working to take down Elan as "Dave Westminister." He ultimately decides not to tell Gino what he's doing since Gino had been working for Ron, and especially doesn't after seeing an online accusation naming Gino as an Elan recruiter. Whether or not Gino would've told Elan or Ron is a mystery that Joe consciously decides not to look into after Gino passes away.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Before Elan, Gino's moneymaking exploits got the attention of some other kids, who rob him. He continues this after Elan, paying hotel expenses for road trips, buying Joe expensive meals, and buying a new expensive car after wrecking one.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Gino is seen in Chapter 59 with blue eyes as he gives Joe "the weirdest fucking stare ever. It was...unsettling."
• Death by Secret Identity: Gino dies of a drug overdose two days after learning that Joe was "Dave Westminister." The villainous angle of the trope is subverted, however, as Joe actively refuses to investigate any claims that Gino had worked for Elan.
• Deducing the Secret Identity: During a video call, Gino flat-out asks Joe whether he was "Dave Westminister." Joe is so stunned by Gino's brazenness that he instantly confirms it.
  Joe: Yeah, that was me.
  Joe: [narrating] When I looked up at Gino, there was this faraway look on his face... and then he snapped out of it and acted like he was about to say something important. But he didn't. He made the weirdest face. Almost like he was angry and proud at the same time.
  Gino: [mumbling] Of course it was.
• Drop-In Character: Gino fairly often after he and Joe leave Elan. Joe points out that Gino has a knack of knowing where Joe lives at any given moment, and tends to just show up out of the blue. It's so common that when Joe gets a knock on his door in Chapter 96 while living in the cold city, his first thought is that Gino somehow found him again.
• Drunk Driver: When Joe and Gino reunite after leaving Elan and drive up to Maine, Gino drives and throws back beer like it's nothing. Gino eventually picks up on how uncomfortable it makes Joe, and lets Joe take over driving.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In kind of a roundabout way; Gino first "appeared" in a blog post on Joe's Elan Dictionary Tumblr site in 2011.
• Evil Pays Better: Gino makes so much money working for Ron that he's able to wreck an expensive sports car, abandon it, and simply buy a new one.
• Face–Heel Turn: Possibly. In his earliest appearances during the Elan chapters, Gino goes on diatribes about how much of an obvious cult Elan is. Shortly after leaving, he even conspires with Joe to start a riot and free some kids, although they ultimately don't do this. Years later, however, Joe does a Google search for Gino's name, and finds that another Elan survivor named Gino as an Elan recruiter who brought more kids into the school. Joe doesn't know whether or not he believes it, however.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Gino and Joe after Elan, although Ron's continued presence in Gino's life strains their friendship for Joe.
• Foil: Gino for Joe. He's a few months younger than Joe, and because he's forced into Elan to get out of a supposedly worse sentence, he's arguably in a similar predicament that Joe was in at the beginning of the story. By the time Gino shows up, though, Joe has been in Elan for a few years and is pretty far into his own indoctrination. Gino openly ridicules many of the things about Elan that Joe himself ridiculed at the beginning of the story, and this serves as a brutal contrast to what Joe has become. Later on, though, it's turned on its head: Joe leaves Elan still hating Ron, while Gino has not only bonded with Ron (due to Stockholm Syndrome), but has also gone into "business" with Ron. To cap it all, when Joe Googles Gino's name after seeing Gino wracked with religious guilt, he finds that Gino was listed as an Elan recruiter by another Elan survivor. Gino eventually dies of a drug overdose a few chapters after Joe talks about cleaning up his own act. However, Joe lampshades this trope in the final chapter, saying that Gino wasn't written as an explicit counterpoint or to advance Joe's own story.
• The Gadfly: While in Elan, Gino takes to stealing the expediters' clipboards after discovering that they would get shot-down for losing their clipboards. When Joe watches Gino in the corner after the Elan 8 riot, Gino slowly drives Joe crazy by prattling on about whatever crosses his mind.
• Happy Ending Override: Gino shows up a few chapters after the first "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, and Joe sees him strung out on some kind of drug, and wracked with some kind of religious guilt. Joe eventually Googles Gino's name and finds out that Gino was accused of being an Elan recruiter. Gino then eventually dies from a drug overdose some years later, the day before he's scheduled to go to prison for an undisclosed crime.
• Heel–Faith Turn: Seemingly. While visiting Joe in New York City, he asks Joe to meet him at a church, and has a long discussion with him about the Great Energy and Joe's beliefs that you have to be genuinely good rather than get rich through underhanded means. At the end of their conversation, Joe sees Gino facing a cross and muttering what is probably a prayer.
  Joe: Hey, the truth is, I don't know what's going on... If believing in Jesus makes you feel something, then I think that's really all that matters.
  Gino: I figure I should believe in all of it. That's the safest bet for a guy like me, right?
• High-School Hustler: Gino, both before and during Elan. Joe describes Gino's backstory getting rich from "pretty much every hustle that was around and available to a kid in New York City," and talks about the ways Gino uses his smarts to turn Elan's rules against other inmates.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Gino is depicted with icy blue eyes; his moral ambiguity becomes a plot point several times during the story.
• Kirk Summation: Gino delivers a pretty heavy one to Joe in Chapter 57.
• Knowledge Broker: A major part of Gino's personality before, during, and after Elan; he's able to uncover information about other people and broker that knowledge to his own advantage. After they leave Elan, Joe points out that Gino has a somewhat uncanny ability to find the address Joe is living at any given time and he has no idea how he does it.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted; this Gino is actually the second person named Gino who appears in the story. The first is a one-off minor character, one of the two goons that recaptures Joe.
• Put on a Bus: Gino had been dropping in on Joe quite a bit in college. However, as Joe points out after Gino gushes about being friends with Ron, "I politely declined getting in with him to go see Ron. I didn't see Gino for a very long time after that."
• Sad Clown: Especially pronounced in Chapter 85, where Joe spends an aside describing how much he appricates hanging out with Gino, because he is the only person he knows who can consistently get him to burst into actual, full-on belly laugther (he notes how the conditioning Elan imposed upon him has otherwise more or less entirely removed his ability to laugh). He also notices that he is not the only Gino has that effect on, but that Gino tends to be the Life of the Party wherever he goes and can pretty effortlessly make even complete strangers break down into laugher at his odd-ball jokes and funny antics. In the same chapter, however, Joe notices that outside this element that makes him extremely likable, the other thing you tend to quickly notice about Gino is that he appears to always be burdened by some strange, heavy darkness that constantly looms over him (even the cab driver that Gino has a brief conversation with, later pulls Joe aside and tells him that he should watch out for Gino, because it is obvious that he is struggling with his inner demons and that he is losing), and that his whole off-the-wall comedian persona often seems to be something he uses to distract the people around him from thinking too much about this.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: In Chapter 75, Gino totals a car, calls Joe to pick him (and several bags of unidentified "stuff") up and drop him off at a car dealership, where Gino buys a new car. Gino later tells Joe that he's making a lot of money working for Ron, although Joe notes that Gino conspicuously doesn't tell Joe exactly what kind of work it is.
  Joe: [narrating] That's right: Gino totalled a car, an expensive one, abandoned it by the side of the road, and then went and just bought a new one like "problem solved."
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When he and Joe drive back to Maine in Chapter 69, they decide to use their knowledge of Elan's security to sneak in and cause a riot, hoping to get some poor kid to escape. When they pull up to Number 5 road, however, Gino quietly drives past it. Joe notes that he can't blame Gino for not wanting to return.
• Stood Up: Joe takes Sofi to New York City and makes plans to introduce her to Gino, but Gino keeps canceling; Gino finally agrees to meet for dinner on the couple's last night in the city, but then completely stands them up with no communication. Two days later, Gino calls and apologizes, offering the excuse that he'd been stressed over legal charges. Joe notes that he doesn't understand why this meant Gino had to completely stand them up.
• The Stool Pigeon: Gino is forced into it when Ron returns to Elan 8, after Ron threatens to have him shot down and his parent group canceled if Gino doesn't give up the names of people he'd made "contracts" with. Gino names another inmate named Dante, but doesn't name Joe.
• The Un-Reveal: In Chapter 100, Joe takes some time to reflect on his relationship with Gino, following the latter's death in Chapter 98, and the rumors that Gino, as a part of his mysterious pantership with Ron, might have been working directly for Elan as a recruiter, and could even have been one of the people who opposed Joe and his efforts, in his guise as Dave Westminister, to expose Elan's crimes to the public and close the place down. Joe admits he never really discovered for certain if this was the case, as he ultimately concluded that he actually wasn't interested in knowing the answer and he preferred to remember Gino as his friend and nothing else.

Katie

Katie is a teenage girl who is stuck in Elan about a decade after Joe's time there. Joe makes contact with Katie's mom during his efforts to get kids out of the school. She narrates Chapter 88.

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• The Atoner: After having participated in general meetings with Sandra as the target, Katie immediately agrees to help her mom and "Dave" work on freeing Sandra from Elan.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Justified; Katie thinks another inmate named Justin is cute, but she refuses to name her fantasies of escaping with him in her "guilt."
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: After being freed from Elan, Katie is not seen again as a character, and is last mentioned in Chapter 92. She's also not mentioned in the Epilogue, aside from when Joe's mom commends Joe for "pulling those girls out."
• Innocent Blue Eyes: As seen in the image, Katie is depicted with blue eyes.
• Moral Myopia: Just like everyone else, but in Katie's case, she feels immense relief when a general meeting is called for Sandra and not her, and she realizes she doesn't care which aunt is dying as long as she gets 24 hours away from Elan. However, she also feels guilty for these feelings, although she notes that — just under a year at Elan — she's starting to get used to feeling guilty.
• Noodle Incident: We aren't told specifically why Katie was sent to Elan, other than her stepfather wanted to send her there and manipulated her mother into agreeing to it.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Downplayed; Katie's mom works out a system where Katie will answer questions as a yes with "Um" at the beginning. Katie does it so well that the phone SP (who only hears Katie's side of the conversation) has no idea.
• Off to Boarding School: Katie's stepfather sent Katie to Elan against her mother's wishes.
• Switching P.O.V.: Chapter 88 is done entirely from Katie's perspective, as she goes through the horrible motions at Elan School.
• Trust Password: When Katie's mom calls her on the phone, she tells Katie to say "Um" as an affirmative whenever there is a question about the school's abuse.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The audience doesn't learn her fate after she's freed from Elan, aside from a few mentions of her and her mother helping Joe free more kids like Sandra.
• Wicked Stepfather: Katie describes her stepfather as an "asshole," and says he's the reason that she's in Elan in the first place. Katie notes that none of her phone calls ever come from him.

Peter

Peter is the Elan student who serves as Joe's "Support Person" (i.e. chaperone) during Joe's parental outing, there to make sure that Joe doesn't spill the beans about Elan's abuse or try to escape.

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• The Bus Came Back: At the end of Chapter 64, Peter calls Joe and says he's in Joe's neighborhood and wants to visit.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Peter is introduced in Chapter 28 as the house's chief expeditor.
• Defeat as Backstory: Peter is assigned as Joe's "Support Person" (or "SP") and gets Maced for his trouble, and upon returning to Elan is further shot down for "allowing" Joe to escape. This makes it ever the more chilling at the end of Chapter 64, when Peter drives six hours to Joe's street and calls Joe up specifically to tell him and set up a meeting.
• Drunk Driver: In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, Joe says that he looked up Peter on the internet several years after their last interaction, and found an article talking about how Peter drove off of an overpass while drunk and high. Peter survived, but a girl in his passenger seat didn't.
• False Friend: Joe is Genre Savvy enough to recognize this when Peter calls him, pretends to be chummy, and claims to be in Joe's hometown to have a friendly chit-chat. Joe picks it apart in his mind: here is an individual who had a reputation in Elan for being cold and petty, had an acrimonious history with Joe, won't identify themselves (but Joe recognized their voice anyway), somehow knew Joe was out of Elan, tracked down Joe's address and phone number, drove 500 miles to specifically see Joe, and very likely didn't come alone. The major tell is when Peter gets agitated and desperate when Joe makes excuses.
• Nothing Personal: When Peter is assigned as "Support Person" for Joe's parental outing, he tells Joe not to act up, and says that it's nothing personal, but he wants to get out of Elan ASAP too and is more than willing to do literally anything to Joe to achieve that end.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Downplayed; Joe says he feels bad for macing Peter, but he also says, "I'm not saying I'm glad it was him, just that I would have felt a lot worse doing it to most of the other kids that I was in the house with. Peter was cold, petty, manipulative, and a bully."
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: While in the hotel on the parental visit, he monitors Joe's bathroom use. When Joe protests, Peter says he can end the visit right then and there. When Joe doesn't respond, Peter says, "That's what I thought, bitch."
• Vengeance Denied: Joe notes in Chapter 80 that Peter "never ended up settling his score with me."
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: He drives several hours to Joe's hometown and claims to be on Joe's block. Joe has no idea where Peter got this information.

John

John is a high-strength coordinator at Elan, who had been secretly meeting up with and having sex with Gina, which gets revealed during the Elan 8 riot. Several years later, he helps Joe take down Elan.

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• Noodle Incident: Joe declines to say just what exactly John does to get the crooked school review sites to remove Elan from their pages.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Being shot down and hogtied for his role in the Elan 8 riot, and for getting Gina pregnant, sends John into a blind fury. John's rage is so intense that every high strength in the house is afraid to monitor him, let alone untie him.
  • He later silently follows "Dave's" online crusade against Elan, and his breaking point is hearing that online review sites are being paid to remove negative reviews of Elan. He reaches out to "Dave," and does something so effective that most of the sites have "the fear-of-God" put into them that they remove Elan altogether.
• Sequel Hook: Joe notes in Chapter 57 that "...unlike Gina, I did hear about John again later in my life...but...you'll hear about that." He later reappears in Chapter 89, where Joe mentions that John becomes part of the "inner core group" working to take down Elan.
• Unperson: John disappears from Elan after his relationship with Gina comes to light. Elan being Elan, the unspoken rule is that the other inmates can't speak of them ever again, although Joe notes that he eventually does hear about John again after leaving Elan.

Gina

Gina is a high-strength coordinator at Elan, who had sex with by a coordinator named John, and the resulting pregnancy gets revealed during the Elan 8 riot.

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• Splash of Color: She's given bright red hair to make her distinctive. When she's shot down, she's depicted with the standard yellow t-shirt.
• Surprise Pregnancy: Completely a surprise since boys and girls are forbidden from even looking at each other.
• Unperson: After her pregnancy is revealed, Gina quietly disappears from Elan. Elan being Elan, the unspoken rule is that the other inmates can't speak of her again, and Joe says that he never finds out what happens to her.

Julian

One of Elan's younger inmates, a 14-year-old Canadian boy who had been given up for adoption as a baby, later dumped into the school as a last resort.

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• Bungled Suicide: Julian eventually breaks under Elan's abuse, and stabs himself with a ballpoint pen in the abdomen out of desperation. It isn't enough to kill him, however.
• Driven to Suicide: Elan is so horrible that Julian attempts to take his own life by impaling himself with a Bic pen. It doesn't work, though.
• Orphan's Ordeal: Of the worst kind. Julian was given up for adoption as a baby, and spent his life as a ward of the state, constantly running away from abusive group homes and foster homes. As a last resort, he was sent to Elan School.
• The Runaway: Julian was this before Elan, often running away from abusive situations. This is ultimately what gets him sent to Elan.

Matt

Matt is one of Joe's classmates at Elan and his first "Big Brother," who Joe faces in "the Ring" after Joe's first escape attempt.

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• And This Is for...: Matt does two of these: one is for Ron, and the other is for being woken up at 3 AM.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Matt shows Joe mercy by refusing orders to jump into the Ring to finish off an already beaten and bloodied Joe; this is met with a general meeting, where everyone is forced to scream at Matt — Joe included.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Matt, who mercifully refuses to finish off an already beat-up Joe during Joe's first Ring, is depicted with blue eyes after his refusal.

Randall

A former Elan "classmate" of Joe's, who Joe liked. After leaving Elan, Joe takes a road trip to visit Randall in college.

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• Disproportionate Retribution: Randall seeks out, attacks, and hospitalizes another college student over harassing a girl.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Joe describes seeing Randall again as "like seeing an old war buddy."
• Rationalizing the Overkill: When Joe asks Randall why the hell Randall straight-up attacked another kid at a dorm party, Randall simply says, "That guy was harassing this girl I know."

Billy

A former "classmate" of Joe's at Elan, who Joe describes as a "close friend" from Elan 8. He and Joe reconnect on an online forum about Elan.

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• The Bus Came Back: Twice:
  • He runs into Joe in New York City during Joe's marriage to Maria, and the two catch up on the subway.
  • He later shows up again when Joe and Sofi visit New York, and lets them stay at his apartment.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Years after Denver, when Billy and Joe cross paths in New York, Joe says that Billy was doing "great, like really good in life" in spite of Elan.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Billy and Joe, partially because of Elan, and partially because of their experiences in Denver. Joe notes that he and Billy are still friends today, and Billy even helped him remember some details about the Denver trip when it came time to write those chapters.
• Mushroom Samba: He has a very negative experience when using Joe's mushrooms.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted; he shares the same given name with Billy Crowe, Joe's running coach at Elan.
• The Teetotaler: Not long after ingesting some of Joe's psychedelic mushrooms, Billy admits to Joe that he'd only smoked pot once (before Elan), and has never gotten drunk. This throws Joe for a loop, because he'd expected all ex-Elan inmates to have fallen into drugs and alcohol.

Wilma

A female classmate of Joe's, who Joe describes as a close friend, "...as close as two people of the opposite sex could be in that place." Joe later goes with Billy to visit Wilma in Denver.

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• Died On A Bus: Wilma dies of a drug overdose not long after Joe visits her in Denver.
• Distaff Counterpart: Joe describes her as "the female Gino."
• Important Haircut: When Joe sees Wilma again after leaving Elan, he notes that she'd formerly been girly and funny, but now all of her hair had been chopped off, and her vibe was way different than before. Joe says it's as if she's rebelling against her personality in Elan, such as it was back then.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Joe in Elan; he describes her as a close friend, "...as close as two people of the opposite sex could be in that place," and his narration says that she was "the girl I loved the most" in Elan.
• Post-Robbery Trauma: After Joe runs away from the get-together in Denver, Wilma's apartment gets almost completely sacked at gunpoint when she and the group of ex-Elan students go looking for heroin. Joe gets back in time to witness Wilma going to her freezer, crying and screaming that the robbers got the ice cube trays, too. This trauma, combined with the visible aftereffects of her own Elan PTSD, makes it all the more haunting when Wilma dies of an implied drug overdose not long after.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Wilma is first introduced when Joe goes to visit her in Denver, then dies of a drug overdose not long afterwards.

Dee-Ray

Dee-Ray is a young man who graduated from Elan about a decade after Joe. Two years after Dee-Ray leaves Elan, Joe (using the "Dave Westminister" persona) meets him online and meets him in person.

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• Mirror Character: Joe recogizes the same mannerisms and emotional distance in Dee-Ray that he noticed in himself after leaving Elan. This is what causes Joe to trust Dee-Ray.
• Secret-Keeper: Dee-Ray is the only person who knows the true identity of "Dave Westminister." Joe didn't even trust Gino with this secret.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Dee-Ray agrees to provide testimony about Elan, casually mentioning that he wouldn't believe that he endured Elan if not for track meet results on Google. This gives Joe the idea to Google recent track meet results for Elan School, and to use that data to comb through his call center's databases and find contact info for the kids' parents. This directly leads to Katie's rescue from Elan, which in turn leads to Sandra and other children being rescued, which contributes to Elan's eventual closure.

Unnamed Rebel

"When Elan doubled down on the abuse this kid tripled down on the rebellion."

A kid who is brought to Elan 8 after Joe leaves. He fights against everything Elan throws at him for a solid fourteen months before being kicked out. At some point Gino becomes one of the kid's "SP's."

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• "Begone" Bribe: After fourteen months of being cycled between the corner and the Ring, and being transferred to another house, the kid is finally placed into isolation in an admin trailer, where Elan gives him access to whatever food, media, or clothes that he wants. Gino points out that it's a very obvious attempt to send the kid away happy so he doesn't rat on Elan for its fourteen months of abuse.
• Determinator: Gino mentions that the kid triples down on his rebellion whenever Elan doubles down on their abuse, and he makes it through 14 months of abuse before Elan kicks him out.
• Double Knockout: Anytime the kid gets put into the Ring, he's always defeated by Elan's champions — which is typical for targets of the Ring — but not without fighting dirty and severely beating several of them down first.
• Evil Pays Better: Gino says that the kid terrorized the staff and every other inmate for 14 months and was rewarded with creature comforts as a "Begone" Bribe, whereas every other kid there had their compliance rewarded with poverty.
• No Name Given: Neither Gino nor Joe's narration give the kid's name.
• Sent Into Hiding: After rebelling against the program for just over a year, the school shuffles this kid into seclusion in an admin trailer, and gives him whatever he wants so they can butter him up before he leaves. And no one knows he's there, save for a select few administrators and a few "SP" inmates (including Gino), who are threatened not to tell anyone that his rebelliousness is being rewarded.
• Unperson: After he's removed from the main houses, it becomes verboten to talk about him (per the norm). What most of the inmates don't know is that the school doesn't want it getting out that being considered unbreakable by the program gets you free goodies and a ticket out of Elan.
• Victory by Endurance: Gino tells Joe that the kid lasted 14 months cycling between the Ring and being placed in the corner. And he's able to hold his own the entire time. Joe notes that, by contrast, the most he ever saw someone last before breaking was eight months.

Sandra

Sandra is a 14-year-old girl in Elan during Katie's time there. Katie's mom and Joe work on getting through to Sandra's mom to try and free her.

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• Bully Magnet: Enforced by Elan; Katie says that Sandra is treated like the house enemy.
• Calling the Old Man Out: One of the reasons why Sandra's mom is reluctant to withdraw her from Elan is because she's afraid that Sandra will hate her for putting her there.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After months of her mother dragging her feet, Sandra finally leaves Elan School.
• The Ghost: She doesn't make a direct appearance in the story; the closest we come to meeting her is when Katie describes her in Chapter 88.
• Noodle Incident: It's not stated why Sandra was sent to Elan School, although her mother insinuates that Sandra needed some kind of structure in her life.
• Put on a Bus: Sandra is finally freed from Elan in Chapter 91, and she and her mother are last mentioned in Chapter 92.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: This is one of the reasons why it takes so long to break through to Sandra's mom. She's invested so much into placing Sandra into Elan that she's reluctant to listen.
• Traumatic Haircut: Katie says that Sandra enters Elan "with the longest, most beautiful hair that had never been cut her entire life." Elan sees this as "image" and forcibly cuts it, and Sandra loses her mind.

The "Core Group"

The "Core Group" are additional Elan alumni who Joe works with during his online campaign against Elan. He doesn't list them by name, but he gives five of them nicknames: "the Immortal," "the Wild Card," "the Warrior," "the Archivist," and "the Rock." John is also a member of this group.

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• And the Adventure Continues: Joe says that even after Elan closes, many people within the "Core Group" continue working to pursue the school's leadership, and continue fighting against other abusive facilities within the troubled teen industry.
• The Bus Came Back: Joe and "the Immortal" meet up in person during Joe and Sofi's eight months living in the United States, some years after Elan's closure.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Joe says that "the Rock" was a girl in Elan 8 at the same time as him, who provides him with encouragement and motivation to keep up the fight.
• Hero of Another Story: Joe's narrative focuses squarely on his own role during the anti-Elan campaign, but he does say that "the Immortal" and "the Archivist" had already been fighting Elan for decades beforehand, and that "the Wild Card" had "been through a LOT."
• Intergenerational Friendship: Joe notes that "the Immortal" and "the Archivist" had already been fighting Elan for decades before Joe entered the game. Joe notes that "the Immortal" had been doing so even before Joe went to Elan himself.
• Oppose What You Suffered: Because all of them endured the same manner of abuse at Elan, they all work together to stop the school once and for all.
• Remember the New Guy?: Joe talks about the "core group" for quite a while before he introduces the five nicknamed members of the group, who are introduced right before the panel saying how Elan finally closed.

People from Joe's hometown

P

P is one of Joe's two childhood best friends from before Elan, who was arrested for drug trafficking the same time as Joe — the event which ultimately sends Joe to Elan. Joe eventually reunites with P shortly after leaving Elan.

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• The Bus Came Back: He's a crucial part of Joe's backstory, and reappears in the story not long after Joe returns from Elan, but disappears from the story for a while after Joe goes to college, and doesn't reappear later on in the Chapter 80 "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue. However, he later briefly shows up again during Joe's separation from Maria, and helps Joe get a job.
• Foil: P is for Joe's parents after Joe returns home. P very clearly sees from Joe's behavior that whatever happened to Joe during the three years was very traumatic, and asks him about it. Joe's parents, on the other hand, either can't tell or are actively ignoring that anything's amiss with their own son, and callously brush off Joe when he brings up their leaving him at Elan.
• Open-Minded Parent: P's parents, when the boys get arrested with weed. They act amused, they chide the boys for getting caught, and they reflect on their own past marijuana usage as teens. Joe notes that he didn't realize parents could even be that cool, and contrasts them with his own parents.
• Plea Bargain: P's parents are amused that P got caught by cops and indifferent to his marijuana use; they lawyer up and get him a plea bargain to get out of the drug trafficking charge in exchange for some community service.
• Small Role, Big Impact: P's presence in the narrative isn't very large, but it is far-reaching:
  • He was there for the drug charge that got Joe sent to the Elan School in the first place.
  • He tells Joe that the drug charges were all dropped three months into Joe's stay at Elan.
  • He later introduces Joe to Reddit, which becomes instrumental in helping Joe and the "core group" take down Elan for good.
  • He asks Joe about what happened at the Elan School; during their conversation, Joe asks for a pencil and paper to sketch illustrations of things. This leads Joe to create illustrations in Photoshop, leading directly to Joe vs. Elan School itself.

B

B is the other of Joe's two childhood best friends from before Elan, who was arrested the same night as Joe and P. Joe later reunites with B while in college.

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• Addled Addict: He tries to get Joe to smoke meth with him, and he later shows up at Joe's doorstep practically salivating for money.
• Foil: As it turns out, B is one for P. After Joe's return, P comes to visit Joe, brings him some weed, and shows some genuine concern for his well-being. The years were less kind to B, as he shows up a few chapters later looking far worse for wear, gives Joe some LSD, and offers Joe some crystal meth. Unlike with P, Joe says that the "'spark' of friendship wasn't there and that sucked."
• Plea Bargain: Just like P, B's parents lawyer up and get him a plea deal to get out of the drug trafficking charge in exchange for community service.
• Put on a Bus: Lampshaded; B shows up at Joe's house in Chapter 70, looking drugged out and desperate for money, offering Joe a carrying case of CD's as collateral. Joe gives B $80, and never hears from him again.
• We Used to Be Friends: Joe notices that his reunion with B didn't have the same "spark" that his reunion with P had. Later on, a strung-out B shows up at Joe's house begging for money; Joe gives B $80, and never hears from him again. Even worse, B is still alive in the present day, and refuses to talk to Joe for unknown reasons; Joe's narration talks about how Joe finds B on a Facebook business page years later. Joe sends a Facebook message to B's wife, who agrees to pass along a message, but then promptly ghosts Joe without another word.
  Joe: [narrating] If by some crazy twist-of-fate you ever read this B, I'm not still mad about what happened, it was a long, long time ago and there is no reason to hide from it. We all go through shit in life and do things we regret. Really man, I just want to say hi to my old friend, even just over the phone...

Chloe

Joe's close friend from before Elan, who he reunites with shortly after returning home.

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• Childhood Friend Romance: Discussed by the narrative; Joe is of the opinion that this would've happened between him and Chloe if his parents hadn't sent him to Elan for three years. It's ultimately averted completely.
• Friend Versus Lover: Downplayed. Chloe's new boyfriend seems (to Joe, at least) to be really irritated by Chloe making him stop the car so she can jump out and glomp Joe. Joe is amused by this.
• Girl Next Door: Joe's narration says she was literally this.
• Remember the New Guy?: Chloe is introduced in Chapter 63 as Joe's childhood friend, saying that they'd "done almost everything together up until the day Elan took me." She hadn't been mentioned at all in the story up to this point.
• Satellite Character: Chloe only shows up in the story to show how much Joe's world has changed during his absence.
• What If?: Joe briefly says that if he hadn't been sent to Elan, a Relationship Upgrade would have likely been the next step in his relationship with Chloe.

Darren

Joe's childhood bully, who Joe runs into about a month after returning from Elan.

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• Bullying a Dragon: After lifting a bottle of beer from a neighborhood get-together shortly after returning from Elan, Joe runs into his childhood bully Darren hanging out with some other kids. Darren steals Joe's beer and mocks him, and Joe coldly tells him, "If your mouth touches my beer, I'm going to punch it." Darren laughs it off and starts to drink it, and Joe lays him out in one punch.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: Subverted. Darren swipes a beer from Joe, and Joe decks him when Darren goes to take a sip.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: A downplayed example. Darren had spent years bullying Joe before Elan, then gets decked by Joe after Joe's return. That said, the act of punching Darren still gives Joe pause.
• Thin-Skinned Bully: Goes down after a mere left jab from Joe. Joe did mention that he was gonna follow it up with his strongest right cross, but apparently a left jab was enough.

People from Joe's college

Eva

Eva is a girl who Joe meets in college, who he starts a toxic relationship with.

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• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Eva when she goes home for the summer, but it's almost a subversion since Eva's flaky, it's unclear whether they're really "together", and Joe is getting stalkery because he assumes that they're going to live Happily Ever After after she gets pregnant. Except when he drives to her hometown to see her, he gets there early and sees her arriving home in a taxi with an overnight bag in tow. Later on, during a phone call, he hears an older man in the background calling her "baby" and telling her to hang up on Joe.
• Amicable Exes: According to the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, Eva and Joe get back in touch years later, as friends.
• As You Know: Eva calls Joe up to remind him about the condom that broke while they were having sex. Before this there had been zero indication story-wise that Eva's relationship with Joe had become sexual.
• Back for the Finale: She reappears in Chapter 80 during the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Broken Bird: Heavily implied; she's certainly got several problems that have led to her heavy drug use.
• But We Used a Condom!: Subverted; Joe and Eva knew the condom broke.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Her first appearance is when Joe notices her at a college party, but gets sidetracked by another girl. We don't get introduced to her until later on.
• Destructive Romance: Mostly for Joe, who gets sick from the pills that Eva gives him, and who just wants to live Happily Ever After with someone he doesn't realize is unstable and flaky. That said, it's also not particularly rosy for Eva, as Joe begins to stalk her when she starts becoming more distant.
• Dumped via Text Message: Or the early-2000s equivalent. Eva's breaks up with Joe over the telephone rather than in person, and the conversation is basically a super-casual, "I don't wanna do a long distance thing, I took care of the abortion, we had fun, bye!"
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted; Eva aborts her pregnancy and casually tells Joe about it over the phone right after breaking up with him, "like she was ordering a sandwich."
• Icy Blue Eyes: Eva is a drug addict who Joe says initially started off "for sure just using me," apparently cheating on Joe with another man before telling Joe about the abortion and ending things, and she is depicted with icy blue eyes.
• Immune to Drugs: Eva pops 18 pills at once for recreational usage, saying that she's so used to the drug that she has to take that many to feel any effect. This comes after telling Joe to take 12.
• Love Interest: Joe certainly sees her as one — he thinks she's really pretty and does pretty much everything he can to get into her good graces and her pants — but it's unclear whether she thinks of herself as one, or only as his "friend with benefits."
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Eva is a deconstruction in the same manner as Marla Singer. At the time of the story, Joe is head over heels about her, but his narration notes that, in hindsight, "She was actually completely crazy, a real drug addict, and obsessed with getting into very serious and dangerous situations." It's also unclear whether she sees her relationship with Joe as non-exclusive "friends with benefits," or if she actually becomes his girlfriend but two-times him on the regular.
• Noodle Incident: In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, Joe says that, like him, Eva also had a super crazy life after their breakup, but declines to say what all happened to her, "...because it's her story to tell."
• Put on a Bus: She disappears from the story after breaking up with Joe.
• Relationship Upgrade: Eva's relationship with Joe goes from being drug buddies to sexual at some point in between Chapters 68 and 69.
• Satellite Love Interest: Subverted and deconstructed. Eva is depicted as Joe's drug buddy turned "girlfriend," and her presence in the story illustrates how Joe's perceptions of adult relationships have been screwed up by Elan's conditioning.
• Surprise Pregnancy: Eva notifies Joe of one. Joe apparently didn't think much of a condom breaking, and Joe had been expecting to break up with her anyway, but he's elated to hear the news. She ultimately terminates it, though.

Quiet Bill

Quiet Bill is a social outcast who Joe makes an effort to befriend in college.

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• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: He completely disappears from the story right after Joe goes with him to Los Angeles during Spring Break, and is probably the most notable post-Elan character who doesn't show up in either "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• The Confidant: Bill becomes another confidant, quietly listening to Joe's stories about Elan, and asking him the kinds of questions that indicate he's genuinely interested.
• Interclass Friendship: Quiet Bill and Joe. Joe comes from an ostensibly middle class family in the American Midwest, and Bill is the son of a Los Angeles multi-millionaire. Joe finds out about Bill's background when he accompanies Bill on a trip to Los Angeles during Spring Break.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Quiet Bill idolizes his rich and important father, who keeps blowing him off for dinner during his and Joe's Spring Break in Los Angeles. The one time Bill's father actually shows up to go to dinner, he completely ignores his own son and spends the entire evening talking to other dinner guests.

Ezra

Ezra is a football player who becomes Joe's college roommate.

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• Cult: Ezra was raised in a religious cult. Joe helps break him out of the cult's spell.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Lampshaded when Joe explains that there's a super important reason he's introducing Ezra to the story.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Ezra had an unhappy life being raised in a religious cult, subject to the cult's whims and rules. Joe can empathize, and helps break Ezra out of the cult's spell. Joe goes on to say that they part ways amicably, and they keep up for a few years after, with Ezra fully separating himself from the cult's programming, and finally living his own life happily.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: The day before he moves out of their dorm, Ezra decides to try weed. He gets super high, then books it back to their dorm to write down all the ideas that are filling his head. He later tells Joe that he's not interested in using drugs again, saying that once was more than enough for him to reevaluate his life.
• Mirror Character: Ezra, for Joe. Just like Joe, Ezra is very secretive, socially awkward, and seems to be going through the same inner struggles with college life and daily functioning that Joe is experiencing. Joe can't help but pick up on the similarities. It eventually turns out that Ezra had been raised in a religious cult, with a "Book of Decency" meant to punish sins much like Elan's "guilt" system.
• Sequel Hook: When Joe talks about how he got his college roommate Ezra, he explains that there's a super important reason he's introducing Ezra ("A truly mind-bending reason, one I couldn't possibly have known when I let him move in that night."), but he doesn't yet say what it is.

Slick Rick

A marijuana dealer who lives in Joe's freshman dorm. After a bad confrontation between the two, they become best friends.

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• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: Inverted; while Rick is the dorm hall's weed connection, it's Joe who gets needlessly aggressive with Rick.
• Babies Ever After: In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, Joe mentions that Rick has a family now, and he's drawn holding a baby.
• Back for the Finale: Slick Rick disappears from the story after Joe leaves for Vrátskajeki, but later gets a mention in Chapter 80's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• The Confidant: Rick becomes one of Joe's, and even Joe's present-day narration seems surprised that it got to that point. It becomes a friendship where Joe confides in Rick, and Rick gives Joe blunt advice.
• Gentle Giant: While he's not exactly big in terms of weight, there are constant references to how freakishly tall Rick is. As for the gentle part, he's easily intimidated by Joe needlessly getting aggressive, and after they start over, becomes one of Joe's closest friends.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: He's called "Slick Rick" because he dressed up as Slick Rick one Halloween.

Rory

Rory is a guitarist who Joe meets through his university's jazz ensemble. The two instantly hit it off and start their own band, Music Mafia.

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• Addled Addict: Rory starts off abusing Adderall and Vicodin, then escalates to Oxycontin and heroin. He eventually goes off the grid for a hot minute, and Joe has to track him down.
• Put on a Bus: Rory goes to Vrátskajeki with Joe, but leaves at the end of the first semester, while Joe ends up staying for another semester. Like Quiet Bill, Rory also doesn't show up in either "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Satellite Character: Rory only shows up within the context of Joe's music education, their band together, and their foreign exchange trip to Vrátskajeki.
• Splash of Color: He's depicted with orange hair in his first appearance.
• Street Musician: He and Joe become a pair of these, playing music anywhere and everywhere.

Others

The Great Energy

A philosophy of the universe that Joe develops in Elan, in the form of a universal life force guiding certain aspects of his destiny, that gives him the drive to survive his ordeal, and later gives him the drive to better himself.

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• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Joe says that he doesn't think that the Great Energy is necessarily aware of or loves him, or has human emotional intelligence, but he also says that he fully believes that it simply wants life over death, and understands a person's intent in doing things.
• Deus ex Machina: Leaning heavily on the "deus" portion. When Joe is at his lowest and most defeated, and considering suicide as an alternative to the hell he's trapped in, the electricity at Elan 8 goes out for the first time in over a year; this leads to Joe's revelation about the Great Energy wanting him to live. Later on, when he discovers that his college roommate Ezra had been in a religious cult, Joe believes that the Great Energy brought them together.
• Fate Drives Us Together: Joe attributes his becoming college roommates with Ezra to the Great Energy, as he's able to understand what Ezra went through as another victim of a cult, and helps break him out of it.
• God of Good: Though he doesn't describe it in godlike terms, Joe describes the Great Energy as the universe wanting things to live, to survive. He uses giraffes as an analogy: the Great Energy wanted them to survive and live, so it allowed them to evolve longer necks to reach high branches in the trees.
• Good Is Not Nice: Joe tells Gino that he believes the Great Energy can be mean as well. As in, if you do things with bad intentions, then the Great Energy will make sure you reap what you sow.
• Heroic Safe Mode: During an extreme punishment at Elan, Joe turns inward and develops a concept of the "Great Energy," which gives him drive and determination to play along with Elan's cruel game and gives him the drive to survive.
• Jesus Taboo: Lampshaded; Joe says that he doesn't want to call it "God" because he thinks that it has too many man-made connotations.
• Reincarnation: When Gino asks Joe how he believes the Great Energy handles evil people who die rich, Joe explains that he believes that the Great Energy just moves a dying person's energy into the next baby being born.

"Casey Jones"

"Casey Jones" is a Vietnam veteran who picks up Joe hitchhiking, after Joe escapes from Elan.

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• Backstory Horror: Casey saw awful things in Vietnam, and tells Joe a story about how the the Viet Cong snuck into his platoon's camp one night and quietly slit half the throats of his fellow soldiers.
• Character Name Alias: He tells Joe that his name is "Casey Jones," which is the name of a popular song from The Grateful Dead. Justified as Casey had previously told Joe he'd been a Deadhead before getting drafted.
• Don't Say Such Stupid Things!: After Joe listens to Casey's Vietnam War story, Joe quietly says that it made his experiences at Elan seem like nothing by comparison. Casey calls him out on this, and is probably the first person to ever tell Joe that Elan's abuse was unequivocally wrong.
  Casey: HEY! Bullshit. You stop with that! Stop with that bull. Listen boy! And you listen good! Don't you never let nobody tell you that you can't be sad 'cause some bonehead somewhere else has been sadder. That's stupid. That's dumb as saying you can't be happy 'cause someone, somewhere else has been more happy. It ain't no contest, Joe, and don't you never forget that. Never. I heard your story and you were wronged, boy. And them feelings you feel, they ain't wrong, okay? They ain't wrong.
• Drunk Driver: Casey picks up Joe after Joe escapes from his parents and Peter. He constantly drinks from a 40 of Olde English malt liquor, and at one point takes a hit from a marijuana pipe. They ultimately don't get into a wreck, and Casey is able to safely drop Joe off in Brooklyn.
• Hero of Another Story: Although calling him a "hero" is a stretch since he's clearly up to something shady with the snippets of his covert activities that Joe witnesses in Boston and Brooklyn. But he's nice enough to give Joe a ride, listen to his story, and give him some cash.
• Mirror Character: Casey, for Joe. Just like Joe, Casey had a happy, carefree youth before being whisked away to a hellish environment. And Casey's PTSD years later — abated by alcohol and long road trips — is not at all unlike what Joe will later experience in the post-Elan chapters. Joe later even becomes a fan of the Grateful Dead like Casey was.
• Misery Poker: Defied with a passion. See Don't Say Such Stupid Things! above.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: When Joe asks him his name, he tells Joe just to call him "Casey Jones".
• Slashed Throat: Casey mentions this happening to his fellow soldiers in the platoon.
• The Vietnam Vet: He was drafted for The Vietnam War and saw horrible things during his time there.

Mikey, Nate, and Sam

Mikey, Nate, and Sam are teens that Joe meets in Brooklyn after running away from Elan. Nate provides Joe with shelter in his apartment overnight.

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• Batman in My Basement: Nate lets Joe crash at his apartment overnight while Joe is on the run from Elan. Nate says his father doesn't care, but also says that Joe can't stay there during the day, either.
• Big Applesauce: They live in Brooklyn, and chide Joe for not knowing that Hell's Kitchen isn't in Brooklyn.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Joe doesn't get the chance to tell them about Elan before he's recaptured. All Nate says is that he knows Joe isn't from any school in the area.
• The Stoner: Downplayed; after Joe wakes up, Nate offers Joe a hit from a marijuana pipe, which Joe declines.

Cathy

Cathy is a woman who teaches a Dovetail drug education class that Joe is ordered to attend after the police charge him with marijuana possession in college.

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• The Alcoholic: A recovering one; she tells the class that she was in Alcoholics Anonymous at some point.
• Apathetic Teacher: A variation in that she's convinced that she's helping, but only does so through condescendingly lecturing her students with nonsense. Her teaching is completely on her terms and with her own prejudices guiding her actions.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To Christy, which is fitting since Joe says Cathy gives him Christy vibes, and accentuated when Joe dreams about both Christy and Cathy after Elan closes. They both have very similar names, have Green and Mean eyes, are in leadership roles in court-mandated educational programs, and are unkind to Joe even while eventually giving him free rein to manage things for them. However, unlike Christy, Cathy is not sadistic, very much less in control, eventually realizes that her educational methods are useless, and ultimately shows much more grace and self-awareness when parting ways with Joe.
• Drugs Are Bad: Cathy's introduction to the comic is her spiel about how marijuana is a Schedule I drug, meaning that it is as dangerous as heroin. There's no nuance to her lectures about it, nor is there any meaningful discussion, to Joe's frustration.
• Fate Drives Us Together: During her final conversation with Joe, she says that she believes that her higher power brought Joe into her life to show her that she needed to stop doing drug education.
• Feeling Their Age: During Joe's last Dovetail class, Cathy pulls Joe aside to tell him that she's retiring as a drug education teacher because his challenging her teaching has really made her feel like the times have changed and she's too old to do it anymore.
• Graceful Loser: Cathy shows an amazing amount of grace when admitting to Joe that his challenging her Reagan-era drug curriculum has made her realize that she's behind the times, and that it's just not for her anymore.
• Green and Mean: Cathy is given green eyes, and she is very cold towards Joe, very eager to get him thrown out of the Dovetail class, and very snide when accepting his apology. It's implied that the entire class hates her because of her bullshit.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: She considers herself an authority on drug addiction because she's a member of AA, but also thinks that weed is as dangerous as heroin, and an inevitable gateway to harder drugs. She refuses any discussion about it, and Joe calls her out for getting basic info about marijuana wrong.
• Ludd Was Right: Joe surmises that Cathy's resistance to his printing out articles and information from the internet could be because her generation saw the internet as a fad at the time, whereas Joe's generation was more willing to accept it.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: Cathy tells the class that AA saved her life, and that this is why she teaches drug education classes. She later attributes Joe's presence in her class to her "higher power," which is a concept that AA members are encouraged to seek guidance from.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Joe says he later feels bad about taking control of the class away from Cathy.
• Worthy Opponent: In a fashion. After Elan closes, Joe has an Elan nightmare where Cathy helps him stand up to Christy, and she even uses the nickname that Joe earned from his drug education classmates.
  Dream Cathy: Let him go! Don't you know who he is??? They call this one the Mayor. He's not a push-over, this one.
• You Remind Me of X: Joe's narration says that he gets Christy vibes from Cathy.

Apollo

Apollo is a puppy that Joe adopts with his housemate Dan.

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• Howl of Sorrow: Joe is awakened from an Elan nightmare one night by Apollo crying at his door. He lets the puppy into his room, not knowing if Apollo was just lonely or sensed that Joe needed a friend.
• Precious Puppy: He's adopted by Joe and Dan, and brings some joy and comfort into Joe's life.
• Put on a Bus: Apollo is rehomed when Joe signs up with the study abroad program in Vrátskajeki. He then stays absent even after Joe graduates college and returns home, likely because Joe returned to live with his parents.

Niels

Niels is a drug lord and marijuana cultivator who lives in the beach city. Joe meets Niels through Niels' girlfriend Laura.

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• Ax-Crazy: Joe describes Niels as having a constant intimidating aura to him, and that he always comes off as unpredictable, even while seemingly acting friendly. This impression is especially strengthened when Niels suddenly punches Joe out of nowhere, accuses him of flirting with Laura, and demands a fistfight to settle things. Niels then backs down and claims that he was just testing how Joe would respond to violent threats. Nevertheless, the incident only convinces Joe that Niels is completely crazy. Further, Laura later begs Joe to assist her in moving out from Niels' apartment in secret so she can leave the country, because of her fear that Niels may try to kill her; Joe readily believes her and helps her out without much prompting.
• Bald of Evil: Niels is depicted as completely bald, with a full beard.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: When he first meets Joe in Laura's apartment, Niels goes ballistic. He later fakes out trying to fight Joe over Laura. Laura later flees from Niels because of his insane jealousy.
• Evil Laugh: Joe notices that one of the scariest and most memorable things about Niels is easily his low, menacing laugh.

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