Takes a lot of comic chutzpah to wring jokes from the hyper-emotional abortion debate, but Lash succeeds. The story's narration is the key - with freckle-faced client Rosemary Austin delivering her weepy exposition to the reader in the comically overwrought style of Silver Age romance comics. (At one point, lawyer Byrd has to shush her for delivering narration while his partner gives her opening argument.) In the story's most trenchant plot turn, the town's rabid Christian conservatives side with a local Satanist church against Ro's decision. The former do so out of anti-abortion agenda, the latter because they want to see the Spawn of Satan brought into the world. Though purportedly at odds with each other, the two extremist groups prove to be more alike in practice than either would openly admit.
A variation on this satiric plot point also crops up in "Sodd, We Hardly Knew Ye," where our lawyering twosome define a Swamp Thing-like creature from both a band of self-proclaimed "eco terra-ists" and a paramilitary survivalist group. Utterly convinced of their rightness, both groups think nothing of tromping on poor Sodd in the name of individual freedom. In both cases, it's the ideologues who turn out to be less humane than any of Supernatural Law's monsters.
Not all of Wolff & Byrd's cases are as loaded with political portent, however. Some are just plain goofy in the manner of a lightweight Twilight Zone episode. In "The Man Who Had His Own Personal Laugh Track," for instance, a flop stand-up comic is victim of a gypsy curse that provides an invisible laugh track to his every utterance. His counselors get the curse removed, only to have the loudmouth jokester bring an even worse curse down on his head.
As lawyers, Wolff & Byrd come across as more convincing than the affectation-laden attorneys of Crane, Poole & Schmidt, though Lash's attempts at humanizing his workaholic leads with romantic entanglements are arguably the weakest part of the series. More enjoyable are the occasional snippets devoted to the firm's spunky secretary Mavis, who Lash renders with the wide-eyed, full-faced cuteness of an Archie Comics girl/woman. Mavis has deservedly received her own series of one-issue spin-offs, which hopefully will themselves get collected in a trade pb. collection one day. She provides a much needed emotional counterpoint to her usually unflappable bosses.
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