Nightmare Fuel / Joe vs. Elan School

Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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And for decades now, Elan always got what it wanted. Mainly because there was nobody around to stop it.

"Food and sleep deprivation played a serious factor, but one thing was clear: Elan turned us into living weapons. And our gods demanded sacrifice."

Considering that Joe vs. Elan School features the Realism-Induced Horror of a Real Life Juvenile Hell, there is no shortage of nightmare fuel, and it starts from the very beginning.

Elan School

• Given what's to come, the opening line is equal parts horrifying and heartbreaking:
  "I was 16."
• The opening panels feature a kid trying to fight back from being kidnapped from his bedroom at 2 in the morning, a common practice for "troubled-teen" facilities. Imagine the trauma of being kidnapped from your bed and carted off to an unknown destination, not knowing what's going on or if the rest of your family is okay. This is known as "transporting" or "gooning" among survivors of the troubled teen industry, and it is the biggest red flag that the program you're getting taken to is going to be abusive, making it the very first taste of the nightmare to come.
• Joe notes how the Elan School compound he's taken to is dilapidated and unsettlingly off. He quickly finds out that there are mechanisms in place — both physical and psychological — meant to keep anyone from escaping. The very first time he tries to escape, which is right when he first arrives, the people Elan has posted in the woods intercept him and bring him back.
• The very first thing that Elan School takes away from new students is their identity. Students are forced to strip and shower in front of strangers, ostensibly for delousing. Their own clothes are given up to the school, and their new clothes are blank. In Joe's case, because of his escape attempt, he's forced to wear a bright yellow shirt, bright pink short shorts, and shoes with no laces. Joe explains it as a humiliation tactic — very effective against teenagers — and hearing the explanation as to why they do this doesn't make it any less horrifying.
• New inmates are assigned a "Big Brother" to orient them to Elan's structures, but this person is a False Friend at best, since the only way to advance at Elan is to screw over others.
• New inmates are forced to start with nothing, and if you're punished you get even less. To that end, Joe is punished for his escape attempt by not being allowed shoelaces, and being forced into wearing a bright yellow shirt and bright pink shorts in order to humiliate him. He notes that Elan School was built off of peer humiliation — an "extremely effective weapon" when used against teenagers.
• Elan forces everyone to become The Stoic. Any trace of emotion, positive or negative, is severely punished.
  • Even worse, several of Elan's rules were deliberately written to both be very vague and self-contradicting (for example, it was forbidden to be "talking too loudly" or "talking too softly", to be "talking too much" or "talking too little", and to be "oversleeping" or "under sleeping"). If someone higher up ever felt like punishing you arbitrarily, even if you ostensibly had done nothing wrong, the rules as written could always provide them an excuse.
• At Joe's first house meeting, where Joe is surrounded by teenagers treating him like crud, we meet Ron for the first time, whose snarl causes everyone in the room to quiet down out of fear. Joe notes how scary the guy is, and how much of a cult leader he seems like, and says that even 20 years later he's still the scariest person he's ever met.^note Which is an extremely unsettling and haunting Rewatch Bonus if you're rereading the comic and know what's yet to come.
  • The house meeting turns into a General Meeting when Joe snarks at Ron. Ron throws a broomstick on the ground, orders the house to "get your feelings off", and they all take turns unleashing a torrent of screaming abuse at him. He then explains that Elan parlayed its inmates' rage at being at the school into something that could be used for the school, leading to the page quote.
• Elan practices collective punishment. Someone screws up, and the entire house only is allowed three minutes to eat. Again, designed to channel rage at others.
• Joe's first escape attempt comes at night — he pretends to sleep, waits for a break in the regular headcounts, and hides out near the house while everyone else runs into the woods. He gets caught only because another student pretends to be on his side.
• He compares Elan to the Stanford Prison Experiment, saying that Zimbardo's experiment had to be cut short after less than a week, but that Elan School ran uninterrupted for 41 years.
• Ron's reflections on Elan's past, which Ron himself was a part of. Back in The '70s when Jay Cirri ran the place, the windows were completely boarded up, inmates were forced to defecate in a bucket (which was dumped on inmates as punishment), inmates were forced to wear straitjackets for two weeks for "acting crazy," and house spankings regularly happened.
  Ron: And that stuff was nothin', we had real bad shit back then...cowboy-ass-kicks, sleepin' outside as the house dog...wakin' up to a "tight house"...the wheelbarrow punishment...or [voice cracking] the horrors of Parsonfield. You kids today have it easy.
• Elan's encounter groups force teenagers to yell abuse at each other for three to five minutes, going in a loop. The recipients of the abuse are not allowed to react at all. It's ostensibly "therapy" but it's not overseen by any licensed professionals.
• The Ring. The school actually has teenagers beat up each other to the point of being bloodied up.
  • The Ring is designed to single out a dissident and place them up against Elan's "champions," to show the person that Elan always wins. The dissident is booed by the rest of the house when he's introduced.
  • A later chapter reveals that an Elan administrator named Caesar attends every house Ring, enthusiastically acting as The Announcer as if introducing a prize fight.
  • Failure Is the Only Option, and you can't not participate. The goal is to show that any kind of resistance is met with a swift and certain end.
• Joe speaks about "the Book" at Elan, where inmates have to "book" at least three other infractions by other inmates, or risk getting "booked" themselves. Joe notes that it didn't even matter whether there was evidence of the infraction or not, and said that many incidents were simply made up.
• After another inmate named Nathan manipulates Joe into silently agreeing to an escape attempt, and Ron and Christy berate Joe with memories of his sister, Joe flips out. Ron and Christy order other students to force Joe to wear a sign that says "FRAGILE - ASK ME WHY I'M A GIANT BABY - HANDLE WITH CARE" around his neck, then have him hogtied and sent to the Corner, where he is forced to eat his dinner while hogtied. Joe then summarizes why all of this was truly awful:
  The most infuriating part of being in Elan: all of this occurred less than 10 feet away form an unlocked door to the outside. As I was dragged up the front stairs by two large teenagers, I realized how truly helpless I was, because it wasn't the doors and locks that kept us in Elan's control... It was much bigger than that. Our house and everyone in it was part of a larger organism, a single-minded system that could only successfully run on sweat, hatred, and blood.
• Joe's escape. Imagine attempting to escape from a hellish scenario, and your own parents — the people who are supposed to support, comfort, and protect you — berate you for being "out of control" instead of pausing to ask themselves why their kid would act this way out of desperation.
• Somehow or other, Elan is able to recapture Joe in Brooklyn after barely three days. Hidden in Plain Sight is not enough to escape those people.
• Joe's descriptions of Synanon, and the ripple effects of its impact that extend to Elan and other similar facilities, will give a sane person pause. Especially when he gets to describing Jay Cirri, who was able to parlay his Synanon experiences into founding Elan School as an easy profit center.
• Speaking of Jay Cirri, he's able to amass such a fortune from Elan that he's able to use his money and political connections to keep himself profitable and out of trouble. Even a state trooper is stunned into quiet compliance when the guys recapturing Joe say that they work for Cirri.
• Joe is forced into a General Meeting with all three Elan houses, where he gets berated by everyone at the school. He is then forced into a three-house Ring, and is swiftly beaten. It's so bad that he refuses to draw it again, and asks the reader to imagine the first Ring he'd already drawn — except bigger.
  I pictured a view from above, so that you could see the massive mob of teenagers cheering and screaming as a lone boy was beaten in the middle of the crowd by kids he'd never even met, one at a time. One after the other. Over and over. And over. Kids from Elan houses he barely even knew existed, let alone their names or where they'd come from, or their stories...kids who'd been chosen to fight "in the name of good" and "for the honor of their house" by adults who drove home in eighty-thousand dollar cars and came to work loudly bragging about who they'd slept with the night before.
  • At one point, Joe and several other students (including the one beating him) pause when they hear a girl freaking the fuck out — she was a new inmate just fresh from her own delousing, and forced to watch a horde of staff and teenagers brutalizing a single person. Joe says that the staff could have shown this poor girl mercy on her first day, but "they probably got off on it." Joe says that he wonders about her to this day, and if she's still traumatized.
• Joe hits his Despair Event Horizon while in the Corner, and begins seriously considering taking his own life. Had the power in the house not gone out — leading Joe to reflect upon its existential implications — he very likely would have made an attempt.
• Ron tags Joe to be Elan's "champion" in an Elan 7 house Ring. The ensuing Art Shift and typeface changes are so deranged that you get into Joe's head as the sheer yearning for any kind of control over his own life, combined with the weight of Elan's horrible, horrible consequences, force Joe to annihilate this poor kid. He only gets snapped out of his adrenaline-fueled reverie when he sees a look of disappointment on a girl's face, and is instantly reminded of his sister.
  • Before that, as he tries to avoid participating, Joe blankly tells Ron that he'd like to run it by his parents first. Ron smiles and says that it's a funny coincidence, because he called Joe's parents a couple of hours ago and they said it was okay. It's not clear if Ron is lying, or if Joe's parents were misinformed, but Joe says that being constantly Out-Gambitted is standard for Elan.
• When describing his rise to the top in ranks at Elan, Joe points out that there was more added pressure; if you messed up, or if a student in your charge acted up, there were severe consequences for you, too.
  • For this reason, when describing that being promoted to Coordinator involved being voted on by other Coordinators, he said that it was usually a No vote out of their own self-interest. He goes on to explain that it's because if the new Coordinator buckles under the pressure, everyone who voted for him would be reprimanded, too.
  • He writes about how awful it is being an SP for corner kids. Whereas Joe had been comparatively easygoing in the corner, he says that a lot of kids would turn into animals and attack whoever was closest, Gaining the Will to Kill with whatever is available. He says a lot of the horror is not knowing if or when the person is going to snap. Worse, he says that he also had inmates throw saliva, urine, feces, and semen at him.
• The third-party account of an Elan riot is horrible. A guy crashes out a window and escapes, the police and fire department are brought in, one kid cuts himself up with razor blades, and the really die-hard brainwashed students made everyone else's life awful. The person even says that they ended up with a broken hand.
• Adding further horror to Joe's situation, Christy refuses to let him talk to his sister because of her and Joe's bond, but lies and tells Joe's parents that Joe's sister can send him letters. Except whenever Joe's sister sends him a letter, Christy typically reads it and then tears it up in front of Joe's face, taunting him about it.
  I remember reading once that it's a very serious federal crime to refuse to give someone mail with their name on it. But like the cigarettes, I don't think Elan gave it a second thought. Why worry about that when you're getting away with crimes against humanity like dehumanization and torture. Or more accurately, making us do those things to each other.
• Joe says that Elan isn't a good program gone bad. He says that it was designed rotten from the start. No guides, no training, "just a green light to do whatever you felt like." He then cites a couple of horrific and sickening "essay" questions given to kids as young as twelve: 1. What was the sickest porno you've watched? and 2. What was the sickest thing you've done to get off? Then he shows a photo of a student's essay that answered these questions, to very emphatically show that he's not making any of this up.
• Joe writes that Elan is effectively a factory churning out psychopaths, since its routines and rules cause students to turn on each other in order to save their own skins. He includes a YouTube video of an Elan "blast" as evidence of how Elan transforms normal people into savage animals — and says that it happens to him, too. Joe experiences severe cases of Becoming the Mask, finding that his "act" has led to him accepting and enjoying it, meaning that Elan's brainwashing is working on a sick level. He later says that the scariest part of his time at Elan was when he noticed that the school's brainwashing had parasitically attached itself to his concept of the Great Energy.
• One thing Joe also notices are dreams of home, which (as he says) is likely his mind's way of seeking comfort the constant trauma. Except one of these dreams turns into a nightmare when he dreams that his sister screams abuse at him Elan-style.
• Joe immediately ends the Elan 8 riot because he is NOT going to have others mess up his chance to leave. As the riot is winding down, Joe talks about Julian, doubled over in pain, because he's just impaled himself deeply in the abdomen with a Bic pen. Joe says he wasn't sure if Julian was trying to go to the hospital or seriously commit suicide, that it's the worst thing he's ever seen in his life, and that he refuses to draw it because it was so horrifying. Even worse, Joe watches the windows for an ambulance that doesn't come — instead, Julian is given a bandage and that's it.
• After the riot, Joe notes that everyone is terrified of a shotdown former coordinator named John, who remains hogtied because everyone is too afraid to untie him. John is seen snarling death threats like a savage animal, and there's no doubt that he would. Joe's narration then mentions that he hears about John after Elan, but is waiting to tell that story.
• One thing that Joe notes about Elan is that several staff members, like the maintenance crew, teachers, kitchen staff, all have a Weirdness Censor that keeps them from seeing just how utterly fucked up the program is. Anytime one of these staff notice or raise objections — like Jerry did — they are promptly fired and replaced.
• Christy keeps stringing Joe along with regards to his graduation date because she comes to rely on his help as time goes on. But Joe also notes that Elan's policy is to keep Moving the Goalposts because it means more income for the school. When she finally gives him one (after Ron threatens her), she invokes Shame If Something Happened daily until Joe actually leaves.
• As Ron drags Gino in front of a General Meeting and orders Gino to report other students' guilt — meaning, the "contracts" or forbidden friendships he'd made with other students — Joe prepares himself to go into berserker mode to harm as many people as possible and escape Elan, somehow. It's awful to think that Joe is ready to seriously maim or kill others over being ratted out for becoming friends with another person.
• Katie's chapter takes us right back into the madness of Elan School, featuring Christy's continued cruelty, and a general meeting to bully a girl who has been stuck in the corner and deemed the house enemy. Katie also describes an "MMR" or "Morning Meeting Report," which involves being laughed at and berated by the rest of the house. Katie's role that day is to read "the poem," meaning that she has to debase herself for the entertainment of the house's strength and high-strength, or else earn herself a general meeting.

Outside of Elan

• When Joe meets the van driver while on the run, Joe has absolutely no idea what the driver's intentions are, and realizes that he used up all the pepper spray on his parents and Peter. Thankfully, the driver ultimately isn't a threat.
• Joe's first experiences with Elan PTSD occur when he escapes, when he finds that he can't sit in the middle of a restaurant booth, and when he thinks he sees an Elan expeditor in Central Park.
• When he eventually leaves Elan for good and gets home, he barricades his bedroom door and sleeps with a baseball bat nearby. He's so traumatized by his experience that he's willing to murder someone rather than be taken back.
• Joe also comes to discover that his own parents deliberately left him there for three years, and refuse to discuss it. In fact, Joe gradually comes to realize that they are more willing to save face with the community and side with Elan than hear out their own son.
• The first example of The Villain Knows Where You Live: not long after leaving Elan, Joe gets a call from Peter, who feigns friendliness and claims to be in Joe's town and on Joe's block. Joe's internal alarm bells immediately go off, as he notices that Peter didn't introduce himself by name; Joe only knew it was him because he recognized his voice. Since their last interaction ended with Peter getting maced, then getting shotdown for allowing Joe to escape, Joe makes excuses and hangs up, and spends the next week avoiding leaving his parent's house as much as possible, and constantly looking over his shoulder the few times he does, paranoid that he's going to be attacked.
• Elan's terrible conditioning leaves its former students with lasting psychological and social issues. Joe and Randall in particular are spurred to violence out of nowhere; Joe punches his childhood bully over a stolen bottle of beer, and Randall methodically attacks and hospitalizes a college classmate.
  • What's worse, it invokes Refuge in Audacity. When Joe snaps and yells at his mother Elan-style, she thinks he's completely crazy. Joe's narration says that this is likely by design.
  • Earlier, when Joe's made his brief escape to New York City, a wannabe Gangbanger starts bothering him, causing Joe to snap at him and scream at him using the same kind of language Ron would use. Once its over Joe feels disgusted and uneasy with himself once he makes the connection.
• Just barely a year out of Elan, Joe gets on an online forum called Fornits, where a bunch of former Elan inmates post, and he is incensed to hear all the disinformation being spread about how great Elan is. He gets into several flamewars with a group that seems to be coordinated in its praise for Elan, and one night gets a DM that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up:
  We found you once, do you really think we can't do it again? Just fucking move on with your life.
  • It's especially haunting for Joe because it's both vague and specific. Did he let slip too many personal details? Were they referring to his recapture in New York? Was it someone messing with him? He has absolutely no idea, and his paranoia is not helped when he gets a knock on his door later on in the evening.
• During his time with Eva, she gives him twelve of an unknown pill, and casually says that she has to take eighteen to feel anything. The drugs hit Joe all at once, and he has to make an excuse to go vomit "like my life depended on it. And looking back, it probably did." Joe spends the rest of the evening experiencing the after-effects of the drug, and at one point hallucinates a demon in his room.
• The details about Ezra's unnamed cult are unsettling, including child betrothal and a "Book of Decency" which contains punishments for their version of what Elan called "guilt." Joe can't help but notice the mental turmoil that Ezra is enduring.
• Joe goes to Denver to visit other Elan survivors. He takes some hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he describes the "perfect storm" of circumstances that lead to his ensuing bad trip: Elan PTSD, sleep deprivation, an empty stomach, meeting up with other survivors, being in an unfamiliar city, feeling unsafe thanks to Diego's knife and shady behavior, and the resulting feeling that he's going to die.
  • His flight from Wilma's apartment is frightening. As he's running down the stairs, he experiences intense time dilation and flashbacks to his pre-Elan childhood. And then he pops out of the building and remembers that he's in an unsafe neighborhood.
  • Then he starts seeing Elan people everywhere with clipboards. The text even switches back to the deranged typeface used in Chapter 51 when Joe brutalizes the other kid in the Ring.
  • The police pick him up, and he hallucinates the officers taking him out into the countryside and murdering him with a bullet to the head.
• Joe's parents calmly lure him home, then immediately berate him about his Denver hospital bill from a year earlier, and declare that his college education is being cut off. Their previous horrific behavior about Elan aside, it's extremely upsetting that they immediately pounce on him and don't ask about his well-being.
• The girl who sexually assaults Joe is frightening with what appears to be chronic sexual aggressiveness. Joe's music tutor warns Joe about how crazy she is, telling Joe that the girl tried to rope the (married) tutor into sex by showing up to a lesson in a raincoat with nothing on underneath. The tutor is spot-on in his warning; the girl has staked out the classroom Joe is in, makes a beeline for Joe when he leaves, and follows Joe home. Joe being Joe, he is too awkward and intimidated to say anything, and politely lets her in despite being sketched out. She asks him to play a song on the guitar, immediately puts her hand down his pants without asking, then pounces on him, straddles him, and starts undoing buttons on her shirt. Joe (justifiably) freaks out and yells at her, so she angrily hurls some homophobic slurs and abuse at him and leaves, leaving poor Joe feeling incredibly dirty and guilty.
• Gino offhandedly tells Joe that Ron sometimes asks Gino about Joe. It's chilling to think that Gino has developed so much admiration for their former abuser that he probably sees no issue with discussing Joe's activities and whereabouts with Ron.
• Niels, the drug dealer that Joe meets in the beach city, is intimidating and extremely mercurial. He strong-arms Joe into selling weed, sucker punches Joe and threatens to fight him (but backs off and says that it was a "test"), and is so possessive of his girlfriend Laura that she has Joe help her escape to another country quietly because she's so paranoid about Niels killing her. Later on, Joe becomes worried about being caught with drugs that he lies to Niels about his whereabouts, ghosts him, and flees the beach city for a time.
• Just the sheer fact that Joe is so protective of his anonymity because he's terrified that Elan's former overseers and/or former inmates will have him harassed, harmed, or sued.
  • More so after the disclaimer that ends Chapter 77, shown in a sans serif font that's not the norm for Joe's narration:
    Due to the subject matter of upcoming chapters, a lawyer has advised me to state that This Is a Work of Fiction. That's right, I made it all up. There was no Elan School (so don't bother looking it up!). All similarities are purely coincidental and nothing I wrote or am about to write actually happened... ahem... especially the stuff I'm about to write.
  • In Chapter 83, Joe finally reads a pirated copy of Maura Curley's book Duck in a Raincoat, released while Cirri was still alive, and gets to a point where Curley's narration mentions that going against Cirri and Elan puts you and your family at risk. He goes on to say that Curley had to flee the country after the book's release when the threats got to be too much. Sure enough, a few days after reading this, Joe starts getting death threats himself.
• After Joe begins his anonymous online campaign against Elan, he does receive death threats, but notes that most of them give up after a week or a month. But in Chapter 90 he talks about this one guy he calls "Two-Face," who writes continually for years, alternating between death threats and apologies.
  "Two-Face": Dave, please forgive me for everything I wrote yesterday, I just get so angry sometimes when someone thinks they can talk bad about a place that saved my life. I pray you reconsider your position, I really do Dave because then I'd stop my search for your whereabouts and fantasizing about finding you and all of the things I'm looking forward to doing to you to make you pay and hurt and understand how fucking wrong you are and why aren't you writing me back you little piece of shit, I know you're reading this and man is it going to be bad for you if you don't stop soon. Like, right now! I'm trying to prevent a massacre Dave don't you fucking understand?
  • What's worse, Joe notes that he's back living at his childhood home yet again, which is the address Elan had on file for him, and is where Peter found him years before. Joe begins seeing an unknown car pull up to his curb at night and sit there for hours, and he has to give himself some flimsy reassurance that the car's occupants are probably stoners just looking for a quiet place to smoke.
• After Elan's closure, and after divorcing Maria, Joe takes to traveling around the world. During one of his adventures, the train he is traveling on is violently attacked. The passenger cars behind Joe's are raided by bandits who beat the passengers and rob them of their money and possessions.

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