Class "R" Detective

***Class "R" Detective*** is the second issue of *Before the Incal*. It's divided in five chapters. In this issue the character of Luz De Garra, John's main love interest is first introduced and the story-line of the case of the babies of the Red Ring starts to develop. It's also the first time we get glimpses of John's early chidlhood.

It was published in 1990 by Les Humanoïdes Associés. It was written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, illustrated by Zoran Janjetov.

## Plot

### **Two is Better Than One**

In one of City Shaft's streets, an urban clown named Wit-nit, is willing to tell
jokes while setting himself on fire in exchange for money: if he makes the holo-viewers laugh his poor
relatives will receive thirteen thousand kublars, but if he doesn’t make anyone
laugh they will receive nothing. However, the act is interrupted when Deepo drops a bomb on a couple of
cybo-cops gathered near the clown, blowing up them up. John uses the confusion to steal the body parts of
the cybo-cops so that he can repair Koblos-5. He escapes through an airshaft,
where he’s chased by robo-sentries, which he hits in the eye to destroy.

Koblos-5
trains John for months, with the objective of preparing him to be a class “R” detective,
although John would prefer to be a class “A” thief. Aware of the fact that John's friends keep him tied to the criminal lifestyle, Koblos-5 attaches a lock of
hair to John, which has a vibrating microphone that will let Koblos-5 listen in on John's
conversations with his friends..

### **Truth is Pain**

John’s gang is coming back from spending time
with homeo-whores when they run into a
Mega-mex war volunteers parade in avenue 345957, and a violent clash between
volunteers and Psycho-anarchists takes place, when the Metabaron suddenly appears and squashes
the warring factions, in what is his last day of active service. John’s gang quickly gets away
from there.

John and his friends are getting high and eating a vitasteak, when they learn through a holovid reportage that a very valuable statuette
from the pre-techno-techno era (recovered by the volunteer army while pillaging
Mega-mex) will be in on display in an exhibit in the Palace of Arts &
Finances. Now that the Metabaron is retired and the police forces are still
reorganizing they might have a chance to steal it.

The gang plans to smuggle a firework launcher
inside the Palace, so that they can shoot them into the air and create a
distraction while John steals the statue. If they get arrested, the cybo-cops
will see that it’s just a harmless toy and realize they’re not thieves. They
give John a hollow camera, so that he can hid the statue there, but when he
pushes the red button to open the hollow camera fireworks come out, attracting
attention to himself. John has been tricked by his friends, who manage to steal
the statue in the confusion. John is being carried away by the cybo-cops, when
suddenly the secret police appear and arrest John’s friends instead, while DiFool is congratulated
for giving the tip about the robbery. John figures out that Koblos-5 arranged
this. Indeed, Koblos-5 altered the pitch of his voice with the vocoder to tip
off the cybo-cops as if he was John DiFool.

Koblos-5 explains to John that
robots like him can actually accommodate human-like feelings, however the
Techno-techno regime leaves no place for emotion since it violates their whole
belief structure, so they put a self-destruct mechanism in all robots, which
means that at the first sign of any feelings Koblos-5 could explode into a
thousand pieces.

### **Don't Stir My Heart**

Now that John has become a a pre-detective his first job consists on
taking a particularly ugly aristo, miss Luz De Garra (daughter of the Prime Minister) to St. Prez, the hospital where
they send everyone with the meropa virus. At the hospital Luz forces John and Deepo to urinate
in the medication of the people who are sick, just for her amusement, and under the threat of making
John lose his pre-detective license. Later Luz makes another demand, he wants a kiss from John. Upon kissing
her it’s revealed that Luz was actually wearing holo-make up, and she’s actually a beautiful aristo girl.

On their way to Luz’s conapt, just when they’re about to enter the
airtube, they get harassed by a bunch of kids and a muscular criminal, but Luz
manages to kill him by throwing her halo, which functions as the aristo’s secret weapon.

### **Hate Will Rise**

After Luz recommends John to become
an official private detective, the cybo-cops inform him that before the final
confirmation all applicants must carry out an official investigation on the
subject that the applicant desires, and that an eye-cop will be sent to stay by his side and transmit the
results to Police Central. To come up with a subject John looks back on his painful childhood: As a child
he was secretly locked up and not allowed outside until he was seven years old,
and, when he was finally let out, he and his parents had to pretend he was adopted. He realizes that he was never given any reason for this secrecy, and that despite all the years he spent in the club where her mother worked, he never saw any of the prostitutes having their own children. He proposes then proposes to investigate the mystery of the babies of the Red Ring.

Meanwhile, at Police Central, cybo-cop XP-207 informs the
Supra-divinoid that John has chosen a “taboo” subject. The Supra-divinoid is angered and afraid that secrets regarding that
subject will be revealed, so he destroys XP-207 to eliminate witnesses.

In the city, John goes back to his childhood neighborhood and remembers how Sofiah, one of the shellbacks captured
as slaves on Mega-mex, used to take care of him as a child. However, when he arrives
at her conapt a Techno Combat Robot suddenly destroys the place, killing DiFool’s
principal witness, nevertheless, he decides to stay on the case.

John decides to go back to
the Daredevil Club to obtain more information about the case, but when he start interrogating the prostitutes about the absence of children the
women get angry, and he gets thrown out of the club by Kaganu, the bodyguard.

### **The Hope of the Wicked**

While
Koblos-5 is busy bathing Deepo, John decides to continue his investigation by spying the flat of several
prostitutes (XB-34 the Beautiful, the Whale of Aldebarn, Hot Connie, the
Technodominatrix, Sex Kitten and Kia-loh the Ebony Goddess), hoping that he might find some clues. Suddenly, John sees a Techno-techno craft arriving
to take Sex Kitten, who’s about to give birth. John wants to tail them in his moto-vette but a Techno Combat Robot appears
again attacking him. The constant attacks against his investigation make DiFool start to suspect that his partner eye-cop might be snitching on him. After Sex Kitten comes
out of the craft without the baby, she interrogates her, but she gets killed by
Eye-cop before she can talk. At that point it becomes clear that Police Central had momentarily took control
of Eye-cop's circuits, an illegal procedure aimed at interfering with the
investigation. To secure that Police Central is not spying on him anymore,
John smashes the eye-camera with Eye-cop’s permission.

As a result of John's on-going investigation the
Supra-divinoid becomes worried the he and his conspirators (him, the Techno-pope, the Prezident, and the Prime Minister) might be on the verge of a scandal, in fact, the eye-cop could communicate with
the millions of other eye-cops and expose their secret. The Techno-pope point
outs that the Prezident was recently cloned into an amphibious octopus from
Betelgama, which further angers the Supra-divinoid. He orders the Prezident to be
transferred to the body of professor Nump of Satellite University. Once the
Prezident is transferred, he decides to use Luz De Garra's relationship with John to get at the young pre-detective.

Koblos-5 is afraid that thousands of cybo-cops,
robo-marauders and executioners scouts will soon be on his tail, and that they
will need some defense, so he has acquired a multicogan for defense. They also
find a new hideout, a place where Koblos-5 used to spy the Blue Monads long ago.
Suddenly, John receives a call in his mini-viewphone.
It’s Luz, telling him that his father, has pardoned him and that he should
come to her conapt, DiFool agrees.

## Other issues

1. *Farewell, Father* (1988)
2. ***Class "R" Detective*** (1990)
3. *Croot* (1991)
4. *Psycho Anarchist* (1992)
5. *Vhisky, SPV and Homeo-Whores* (1993)
6. *Suicide Alley* (1995)