Armored
Writer: Michael Schwartz
Artist: Ismael Hernandez
Letterer: Ferran Delgado
Publisher: Clover Press
Back the Kickstarter through June 27, 2025
I have heard for some time that Armored is a Kickstarter worth checking out, and, indeed, I’d seen the book splashed across online comics circles. My first impression of it was that it was pretty clever teen adventure comic. The covers and the summary text makes the elevator pitch clear: a boy discovers a haunted suit of armor…and then he has to team up with the ghost knight tethered to it to defeat some kind of ancient evil. That all seemed pretty cool, but what I did not realize is that there was a far darker and more poignant tone beneath.
Indeed, in Armored, nearly the entire cast of characters has suffered some kind of momentous, life-changing loss. The young boy at the center of the story is up for adoption because his biological parents have gone missing without a trace. The couple who adopts him has lost a son his exact same age. His best friend at school his mourning the loss of her mother. Even the two kids who bully him have a best friend who has passed away.
It all makes for weighty kind of teen comic, and it serves the book well. But maybe we should back up before getting further into all of that.
If you haven’t heard of Armored, it’s publisher, Clover Press, is currently running a Kickstarter for a hardcover book that collects Armored #1 – #5 (funded as of this writing for more than twice it’s goal). But this isn’t the first Kickstarter campaign for Armored, far from it. The book launched with a first issue in 2023, and then a second campaign in 2024 for the full first arc, totaling more than $20,000.
It’s written by Michael Schwartz — who has a few screenwriting credits but is doing his first work in comics here — illustrated with fully painted artwork by Ismael Hernandez, and lettered by Ferran Delgado. It’s all organized publisher Clover Press, who routinely punches above its weight in indie comics spaces. And as noted above, there’s definitely a sort of old school teen adventure feel to this book. It reminded me to the comics I read as a pre-teen and teen in the late ’90s and early ’00s. It’s got a traditional sort of sci-fi/fantasy adventure concept with a main character that your average seventh grader can imagine being.
But on top of that is the aforementioned sense of loss. That’s a powerful narrative tool, of course, but this book also ties it to its high concept. Our hero is entangled with magic armor and ghosts of the far past, while at the same time he and everyone around him grapple with a loss from their own recent pasts, trying their best to figure out how to keep living and move on. I think this thematic syncing up is what really drew me in and compelled me to read this very good comic from start to finish in one sitting.
The artwork is also quite good. Hernandez painted comics art serves the story and the tone well, oscillating as it does from classroom scenes to full on magic armor ghost battling. And Delgado does a tremendous job supporting it all with lettering. The character-specific lettering for the ghost knight especially stands out.
And while I did struggle to easily understand the ghost knight’s old-timey dialect in places, I appreciated how unique each of the character voices sounded in this comic. The high concept is a good one, but Schwartz scripts all his characters so well that you can easily tell who’s talking by what they’re saying. That sounds like an obvious thing, but so many super popular comics don’t pull it off nearly as well as Armored does.
In the end, Armored is a Kickstarter comic that makes a great argument for crowdfunding comics as a serious force in the industry, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
The Armored Vol. 1 Kickstarter campaign runs through June 27
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