I haven't read all of the comics, but from the dozen or so stories I've read, Lash stuck closely to a basic template. Some supernatural being-- a ghost, a vampire, a swamp monster-- gets in trouble with the law and the titular counselors defend him, usually finding some obscure legal reason to exonerate the piteous creature. Sometimes the creature escapes the long arm of the court, sometimes he's successfully re-socialized, but readers could always expect lots of puns, like the one in the story I'm looking at here.
"Statue of Limitations" is a little unusual in that Lash parodies one of the lesser lights of the monster-world: the statue that comes to life. Indeed, the best known examples of "living statues" don't usually have horrific overtones, ranging from the classical tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to comic takes like ONE TOUCH OF VENUS, a 1943 stage musical and later a 1948 film.
This time the supernatural boogie-person doesn't actually cause any chaos herself. She's an archaic statue known as Cerelia , and she's on display at a big-city museum. An ordinary schmo named Tim Jacobsen becomes so entranced with Cerelia's, uh, "statuesque" beauty that he jumps atop the statue in front of many other museum-visitors. Lash doesn't say much about what Jacobsen may have been trying to do, but the eventual effect is that the statue comes to life.
Usually, when inanimate beings come to life, they can't wait to get out there and taste the joys of life. But Batton Lash suggests that maybe a statue, whose purpose has always been standing around and being looked at, has no such desires. The museum-managers are irate at Jacobsen for having animated their priceless exhibit (what Lash cleverly calls a "sex objet d'art"), but Cerelia doesn't show any sign of running away. She's been brought to life many other times in her existence, always by men who idolize her as "the perfect woman," just as Jacobsen does. Wolff and Byrd have to play referee between their client Jacobsen and the museum-owners, who want their statue back-- though I wonder if a simple statue would have been more of a money-maker than one that comes to life and is perfectly willing to be stared at, unlike, say, most real women.
A more obvious comic take on this theme would've been only to spoof Jacobsen's idealization of women, and Jacobsen certainly comes under fire for this male tendency. (He gets a living woman at the end of the story, but it's suggested that he's going to over-idealize her too.) However, Cerelia is interesting precisely because she's the incarnation of feminine stasis, making it hard to say which came forth, the idealization of femininity or the feminine attempt to get idealized . As Cerelia herself puts it:
I suppose I could just sit here and let you adore me-- but that's as far as I go.
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