As many of you now know, Genndy Tartakovsky is making a Conan the Barbarian animated series for Prime Video. 

He’s adapting “Queen of the Black Coast”–one of the most emotionally brutal and philosophically loaded stories Robert E. Howard ever wrote. 

If you’ve been watching Primal, none of this should surprise you because, Primal was – for all intents and purposes – always a show heavily based on Robert E. Howard’s properties. 

The names. The visuals. The philosophy. The monsters. The worldbuilding method. All of it traces back to Howard. Here’s how we know. 

All the Ways that Primal is a Robert E. Howard Show 

To start, the show’s two protagonists are named Spear and Fang. That’s the title of Robert E. Howard’s very first professional publication. “Spear and Fang” appeared in the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales. 

The story is set in prehistory and it follows a violent conflict between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Tartakovsky took that title and inverted the premise (his Neanderthal isn’t the monster, he’s the hero) but the DNA is right there in the name. 

The visual lineage is just as direct. Frank Frazetta’s covers for the Lancer paperback Conan editions in the 1960s and ’70s defined what the sword-and-sorcery genre looks like: impossibly muscular figures; swirling dark energy; heaps of slain enemies. Tartakovsky and art director Scott Wills have explicitly cited Frazetta, Moebius, and Heavy Metal Magazine as foundational influences on Primal’s look. Tartakovsky said he was “bedazzled by Frank’s work” as a teenager. 

You can see that manifest in every frame of Primal, especially in the ways the exaggerated musculature and pose-to-pose action maximize the impact of every single strike. When Spear enters a rage state, the background drops away entirely and is replaced by a solid blood-red canvas that isolates his silhouette. That is a near direct visualization of Howard’s description of Conan consumed by a red mist of unreasoning fury as he tears through his enemies. 

The philosophy running underneath Primal is Howard’s philosophy, too. Howard’s bedrock conviction was that civilization is fragile, hypocritical, and temporary. He had Conan say it plainly: barbarism is the natural state of mankind, and civilization is unnatural. He wrote in personal correspondence that if you break the skin of civilization, you’ll find the ape, roaring and red-handed. Primal dramatizes this worldview in a single episode. Episode fifteen, “The Primal Theory,” abandons the prehistoric setting entirely. It takes place in an 1890 Victorian manor house (which might be a friendly nod to Conrad and Kirowan’s Wanderers Club). A group of aristocratic scientists debate human origins. One of them, a scientist named Charles, argues that under extreme crisis, civilized people will shed their conditioning and revert to their savage nature. His colleagues laugh at him. They cite their advanced weapons and refined intellects. Then an escaped, cannibalistic asylum inmate breaks in. The scientists try to fight back with guns and swords. They are systematically killed. Every civilized tool fails. The only survivor is the one who throws away his weapons, abandons his dignity, and fights like a caveman. 

Primal is not just emblematic of the Conan stories, either. Primal achieves similar genre-blending without blinking the way that Howard did throughout his other stories. The episode “Terror Under the Blood Moon” pits Spear and Fang against gargantuan bat creatures terrorizing a tribe of monkeys, which feels remarkably Solomon Kane-esque.

The episode “Coven of the Damned” introduces blood magic, mind control, demonic shape-shifting, and a Head Witch who transforms into a towering demon–all of which are the kinds of entities Kull and Bran Mak Morn face in Howard’s darkest stories.

Spear himself is a sort of amalgam of three of  Howard’s greatest heroes. He has Conan’s innate morality in that he only kills for food, defense, or to protect his people. At the same time, Spear has Conan’s savage resilience which allows him to survive wounds that would kill anyone else. But he also carries Kull’s brooding introspection. Yet Spear also has quiet moments where he sits in silence, stares into the distance, and wrestles with the weight of everything he’s lost. That feels remarkably similar to the cerebral, melancholic moods of Kull. And, beneath it all, Spear is a dark, primitive leader fighting a hopeless war against an advancing world, just as Bran Mak Morn was. Bran was the doomed king of the Picts, the fading remnants of a dying age. Spear, as a Neanderthal, is an evolutionary dead end, a last of his kind, standing defiant against the turning of the wheel. Season 3 makes this connection even harder to miss, as Episode 3, “Feast of Flesh,” reads as a clear homage to “Worms of the Earth,” one of Howard’s most celebrated Bran Mak Morn stories. 

In Primal, the types of danger that are present are just the same as those that permeate the settings of sword and sworcery stories like the ones Howard wrote. In the first season, threats are natural beasts like horned tyrannosaurs and massive prehistoric bats. In the second season, the threats become ideological and militaristic, like vikings arrive with domesticated bears and iron swords and a naval empire that enslaves entire populations. Spear navigates these civilizations the way Conan navigates civilizations in the Hyborian Age: with raw instinct that cuts through their machinations every time. And just like Conan found the great cities to be dens of institutionalized cruelty, Spear finds that civilized humans are far more sadistic than any predator. 

The Smoking Gun Connecting Primal to Robert E. Howard’s Stories

All of this pontification is interesting, but there are also just clean facts of where Primal came from that make our case airtight. 

In 2007 and 2008, Genndy Tartakovsky pitched an animated Conan project to Lionsgate. He envisioned a budget of roughly three million dollars. Studio executives told him the ceiling for an adult animated action film was four hundred thousand. The project was killed.

For fifteen years, that Conan show didn’t exist. The American market didn’t believe adult animation could carry a property like this at the quality level it required.

Then Tartakovsky made Primal. A multi-season, critically acclaimed proof of concept that adult animation can handle extreme violence and mature themes while simultaneously achieving the kind of emotional depth that live action rarely touches. It proved there was a massive, hungry audience for high-fidelity sword-and-sorcery animation.

Given all of the above, it’s easy to see Primal as something close to a fifteen year proof-of-concept, which relied on the bones of one of the greatest story tellers who ever lived to state its case. 

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Tartakovsky has been making his case in front of all of us for years. His love for Robert E. Howard shows up in every single frame of the show you grew to love. 

And now he gets to stop working around the source material and work with it directly by building a show directly around one of Howard’s legendary characters. That’s why we couldn’t be more excited about what’s coming.

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