Cartoon Network Studios reached out to Heroic Signatures about a Conan animated series because Genndy Tartakovsky told them he wanted to make one. 

He’d been trying since 2007, years before Primal even existed. 

A Conan the Barbarian animated series is now in development for Prime Video, with Tartakovsky as executive producer and showrunner, and Darrick Bachman, Fred Malmberg, and Mark Wheeler as executive producers. The show will be produced by Cartoon Network Studios, and anchored on Robert E. Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast.

This is the story of how it all came together. 

Eighteen Years

Fred Malmberg, founder of Heroic Signatures, first sat down with Genndy Tartakovsky to discuss a Conan project in 2007. The original vision was a 2D animated film. This was before the streaming revolution, before adult animation had any real market credibility in the United States. They pitched it to Lionsgate, who at the time distributed Marvel’s animated movies. Genndy estimated the budget at roughly three million dollars. The Lionsgate executive told them the ceiling for a Marvel animated film was four hundred thousand. That was the end of the conversation.

It would have been easy to take the note, scale it down, and make something cheap and forgettable to scratch the itch. But they didn’t. So, for the next decade and a half, the project stayed alive as an ambition that kept colliding with the same wall: the American market didn’t believe adult animation could carry a property like Conan at the quality level the material demanded. Anime was still niche outside dedicated fan communities, and Adult Swim remained a late-night curiosity rather than a proof of concept. The idea that a major streaming platform would bankroll a violent, emotionally complex animated series adapted from Robert E. Howard’s original prose was–in the language of the executives who kept passing–not viable.

But the market did eventually move forward. Subtitled international content became normal viewing, anime crossed into the mainstream, and Castlevania demonstrated that Western adult animation could sustain prestige serialized storytelling. Primal then put Tartakovsky’s name at the center of that shift, and the industry that had refused to finance a three-million-dollar Conan film in 2007 finally had the appetite for exactly what Malmberg and Tartakovsky had been pitching.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Tartakovsky created Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack for Cartoon Network, the latter an Emmy Award-winning series about a lone swordsman displaced in time, fighting through surreal landscapes with a visual language closer to Kurosawa than Saturday morning television. He directed the original Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series, helmed all three Hotel Transylvania films, and created Primal, the wordless, Emmy Award-winning saga that became one of the most critically acclaimed animated series of the last decade. 

To put it lightly, he is the real deal, and perhaps the best positoned to tackle a character like Conan with the seriouenss that it deserves. 

The Story He Chose

The story Genndy selected to anchor the first season isn’t one of Conan’s action showcases. It is arguably the most emotionally demanding story Robert E. Howard ever wrote about the character – Queen of the Black Coast – and the one that reveals more about who Conan actually is than any other single work in the canon.

The story opens in a courtroom. Conan has been hauled before a magistrate and ordered to betray his companions. His response is a rejection of laws, citing them as nothing but instruments of the powerful, and refusing to recognize their authority to enforce them. When they try to arrest him, he kills his way free and ends up aboard a merchant vessel headed down the coast. Within the first few pages, Howard establishes that Conan operates under a moral framework that is entirely self-authored.

On that ship, Conan meets Bêlit, the pirate queen of the Black Coast. Marcos Cronander, President of Heroic Signatures, identifies Bêlit as the character Conan respects without reservation. The dynamic Howard wrote between them is one of two apex predators who recognize each other and choose partnership and love over competition. For three years they raid and kill people. Conan is not, by any modern standard, a good man during this period. He is a man fully alive, doing exactly what he wants with someone who matches him at every turn.

The philosophical core of the story surfaces in the conversations between Conan and Bêlit aboard the Tigress. Conan articulates his theology of Crom, the god of the Cimmerians: Crom gives you the breath in your lungs and the strength in your arms at birth, and that is the entire gift. There is no afterlife waiting and no favor to be earned through prayer. What you do with what you were given is your problem alone. It is the most complete window into Conan’s interior life that Howard ever committed to the page, and it reframes him as a man living through a philosophy that demands nothing less than total engagement with the world.

Then a dark sorcery threatens to destroy everything, and a battle-hardened Conan defies gods, fate, and even death to save her. It makes sense why: no woman had even been his match, and then one was. With this, the great mirth and the great melancholy that the Nemedian chronicles attribute to King Conan is easily understood as the very measure of what Bêlit means to him, and so of course Conan will not accept losing her.

It is a tall task to tell such an emotionally resonant story for such a famously ferocious character, but if anyone is up to the task it is certainly Genndy. In Primal, he conveyed emotion of this magnitude through nothing but visual composition, facial expression, and score, without his leads ever speaking a word. It is what Malmberg calls his defining gift as a director, and it should please every Conan fan to know that Genndy has told Heroic Signatures he wants to bring that emotional weight to Conan.

Stay Tuned for More Information on the New Genndy Tartakovsky Conan Series!

It brings us immense pleasure to be able to tell all of you that the new Genndy Tartakovsky Conan series is now in active development for Prime Video, produced by Cartoon Network Studios. 

While we can’t give you an exact release date just yet, we can tell you that outlines and scripts are in progress, and that the creative material that has come together so far is, by every account, exceptional.

The Conan that Genndy Tartakovsky is building is the one Robert E. Howard wrote and that we’ve all been dying to see on whatever screen we stream through for years.

We’ll be talking more about this show and holding more exciting conversations at two special Conan panels during San Diego Comic-Con!

Conan the Barbarian: Beyond the Comics takes place Thursday, July 23 at 10:30 AM in Room 24ABC, with Conan the Barbarian: Tides of the Tyrant-King! following on Saturday, July 25 at 3:00 PM in Room 28DE.

If you can’t make it to San Diego, follow Heroic Signatures on social media and subscribe to our YouTube channel! We’ll be filming the panels so you don’t miss a thing.