When Trenton Doyle Hancock was 10 years old, he made up a superhero: Torpedo Boy. The character has become the center of a complicated cosmos Hancock has developed obsessively for more than 30 years. There are drawings, paintings, sculptures — and now, a plush stuffed doll. "Well, he looks like me," Hancock says. "He's a black guy. His face is basically my face." Torpedo Boy is a recurring character throughout Hancock's work, and in a new exhibition called Moundverse Infants at Temple Contemporary, the museum at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. It's a deep dive into the fantastical alternative world Hancock created. "Mounds are these half-human and half-plant creatures," he says. "They're kind of these dopey big mound heaps that can't really move or do anything." Hancock's moundverse is proudly bizarre and dizzyingly complex. It contains dozens of characters — including a goddess who controls color. "And this color can be manipulated to fuel, and different things," Hancock says
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