I was today years old when I learned that Operation Long Leash may or may not have been a thing. Which is interesting as I minored in art history and took several courses on American art specifically. I can see Doctor Bjelajac skipping over Long Leash, though, as something that sounds more like the plot of a convoluted spy novel than a historical event.

And it’s something no one – not even the CIA (at least, not insofar as they’re willing to admit), supposed architect of the plot – is willing to confirm. Though they have denied it.

Sort of.

Regardless of whether the plot to use abstract expressionists and American contemporary artists as unwitting propaganda tools against Soviet realism (damn those Commie bastards for painting people who looked like people anyway) was planned and executed – or a complete fiction – it makes fantastic story fodder and provides the central conceit for Pollock Confidential: A Graphic Novel by Onofrio Catacchio (Laurence King).

Told from the perspective of Pollock’s fictional, former CIA handler Dan Adkins, the book offers a fresh take on Pollock’s life and work, his triumphs and failures, and the indelible mark he left on American art.

Jackson Pollock grew up in Wyoming with four siblings. His father was a surveyor who sometimes took Jackson with him on trips, which is where the boy first saw Native American sand paintings, the methods and designs of which would later influence his work. Notorious for his temper and his reclusiveness, Pollock is known to have suffered from depression and alcohol addiction.

He did seek treatment in the form of Jungian psychotherapy and had himself voluntarily admitted for treatment on several occasions. Unfortunately, unable to remain sober, he was killed while driving under the influence in 1956 at the age of 44. One passenger was killed in the same accident, and the woman with whom he was having an affair was severely injured. Alas, as is often the case in the art world, all your favorites are problematic.

What’s interesting about Catacchio’s version of Pollock’s biography is the union of fiction and nonfiction into a cohesive whole that starts not from the postscript of the artist’s life but from the height of his fame with the rest unspooling both forward and backward in time. This is done simultaneously as Adkins gains Pollock’s trust as the “friendly neighborhood grad student seeking solitude to work on his thesis.” In the details, Adkins slowly gets to know the man behind the mark – a difficult, complicated human; a genius grounded by his own foibles and failures.

Pollock Confidential is a study of the ways in which myth, when the subject is someone as important to a generation as Jackson Pollock is (i.e., someone who changed the way the world thought about art, paving the way for Warhol’s Pop and everything else that came after), can be as important as fact.

In the end, does it matter whether Operation Long Leash was carried out? Does it matter that experts in such matters believe it could have been? That individual entities and their ideas regarding the creative process and what was and wasn’t fit to hang on gallery walls could save a nation?

Catacchio does an amazing job of fusing the micro and macro bits of this story, holding the larger world in one hand and Pollock in the other, studying both and figuring out how they fit together… along with where they don’t – or couldn’t. Doing this through a semifictional lens allows for a flexibility that might not otherwise be possible, and it allows for an observer who stands in for all of us: someone with a badge and an assignment granting permission to get involved rather than remain remote and granting him the right to literally knock on Jackson Pollock’s door.

What better way to bring people into history than to have the subject of study invite them in?

Pollock Confidential: A Graphic Novel by Onofrio Catacchio is available now from Laurence King.