“I must get out of this house,” betrays the thought bubble floating near Tom’s bewildered expression as he sits in an overstuffed chair with an open book in his hands. Tom, the feline-half of the notorious duo Tom & Jerry, sits alone without his little tormentor in Karl Haendel’s Tom & Jerry #3 (2010), a hand-drawn graphite appropriation of a comic panel that muses on Tom’s self-awareness. The book the cat holds in this frame is a generic “everybook,” and its ability not to hold Tom’s attention undercuts the very notion of storytelling to which he exclusively belongs. In Haendel’s decontextualized comic, re-rendering Tom in a moment of contemplation emancipates him from the cultural construction of storytelling. Haendel is an ambitious inheritor of the promiscuous appropriation strategies practiced by the Picture Generation artists of the 80s. His interest in redrawing and re-presenting images however is notably less skeptical and less ironic than that of the early work produced by Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, and Barbara Kruger. Yet Haendel too is compelled to detach and recontextualize the images, objects, and signs that orbit his field of interest, resulting in work dedicated to similitude and semiotics. In his project at the Tony Wight …