Fandoms have learned to read leadership announcements the way Conan reads a too-quiet ruin: assume something in there wants to eat you. 

So when we tell you that Fred Malmberg, after a quarter century stewarding Robert E. Howard’s worlds, has handed the presidency of Heroic Signatures to Marcos Cronander, we understand the instinct to brace for a stranger with a spreadsheet.

You can unclench. 

We sat down with Marcos for ninety minutes to talk about the job, and we mostly failed, because he kept hijacking the conversation to defend Yasmina’s honor, lobby for Hyperborea’s screen time, and make the case that Predator is a perfect action movie with exactly one flaw (it’s the opening spaceship shot, which he fast-forwards past when screening it for first-timers so the reveal still lands). 

The Paperback Test

We started our conversation with the question every reader uses to sniff out a tourist: your top three Howard stories, go. “Everyone at the office knows that People of the Black Circle is hands down my favorite,” Marcos said, calling it the most filmable thing Howard ever wrote. “If I had my total way, which maybe I will now,  that would be the Conan movie.” 

Then he spent five unprompted minutes on the Devi of Vendhya. “She’s one of the most underrated Conan characters ever. She’s just as cool as Valeria and Bêlit.” He walked us through the story’s closing image: Yasmina riding to Conan’s rescue in the hill-tribe clothes he found for her, a royal cloak thrown over them. Then, he lingered on the final exchange, where two people who plainly like each other promise to meet again on opposite ends of a sword. He wants a sequel. He has wanted one for years.

Beyond the Black River took the second slot, partly for the Balthus perspective of realizing “God, you’re that guy”, and partly for the warning Conan delivers before everything on the frontier goes wrong: “You Aquilonian idiots don’t know what you’re messing with. This is going to end badly, just like it ended badly when you tried to conquer Cimmeria.”

Queen of the Black Coast closed the list, and his reasons were a reader’s reasons. The courtroom scene where Conan, asked to inform on a friend, reviews Argossean law and finds it wanting – “your laws are bullshit” is the Cronander gloss. The theology delivered on the deck of the Tigress: “Crom gives you life, and that’s it. Now it’s up to you to make the best of it. And Conan’s making the best of it.” The finale, which Marcos reads as a Predator movie published four decades early, where Conan essentially says: “I’m ready for this. I’m going to take the fight to the monster.” He threw honorable mentions at Jewels of Gwahlur and Xuthal of the Dusk before we could stop him. The picks coincidentally happen to double as a curriculum: read Black Circle for the full inventory of what Conan can do, Black River explains the frontier that forged him, and in Black Coast he drops his guard long enough to be known.

Marcos Cronander Believes that Magic Should Be Rare, and It Should Scare You

There’s a speech Marcos delivers so often to video game studios, film partners, and anyone pitching on the license, that around the office it’s known simply as the rant.

“Conan’s world is low fantasy, and to me low fantasy means that if you were a normal person in the Hyborian Age, your life maybe wouldn’t look that different from some Mesopotamian farmer,” he said. “You’d just have a regular day. You wouldn’t be seeing elves and goblins. Maybe one friend claims he saw a werewolf in the forest.” 

Conan trips over the uncanny constantly because he goes looking for it, and the stories work because the weird arrives on a gradient spanning bandits, ape-beasts, and a thing wreathed in shadow that the brain refuses to parse. “Make the magic feel special,” he tells partners. “So when you finally see the sorcerer, or the eldritch being, you go, ‘My God, this is crazy.’”

The same instinct makes him the rare executive who turns down the most popular pitch in the building. Studios float a Conan-skinned Dark Souls-like video constantly. He says no, and the reasoning comes straight from the controller. “Those games are about grinding you into the dust and making you feel insignificant. That’s not the Conan fantasy. You should feel like a badass.” His reference point is Space Marine 2: “When I was playing that game, I thought, this is what I want to feel when I play the Conan game.”

And he holds the line that hardcore Howard readers most fear a new regime will erase. Under Cronander, Conan will stay dangerous. “He’s not a good guy by our modern standards. He’s a product of his world, and his world is brutal, and you’ve got to be brutal and tough to survive in it. He’s the paragon of that.” He explained further how Conan is unlikely to free a slave on the principle that slavery is wrong, but he might if they’re friends, or if it covers his own escape from a cell. That sensibility now has paper behind it. The brand guides and lore bibles every partner builds from were assembled under Marcos’s hand, which means the ‘rant’ survives even when he isn’t in the room to deliver it.

The Two-Hundred-Million-Dollar Answer

Every comment section eventually produces the accusation that Heroic Signatures is just kind of sitting on its properties. Marcos addressed these comments with numbers. “A triple-A video game costs a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred million dollars. Movies are the same. I would love if we just had two hundred million dollars laying around at the office.” Raising that money, attaching it to the right people, and pointing it at the right vision is the unglamorous center of the job, and he was candid about the learning curve: “People really underestimate (including myself) how hard it is to get these things made until I joined the company and saw it with my own eyes.”

Still–even with how hard it is to get things made, it’s not as though the company takes the easy way even when it’s really easy. Fred could have greenlit another Conan movie years ago if he’d been willing to take the check and look the other way. “But he didn’t, and we don’t, because we know that’s not the right thing to do.” Not that he’s a purist about adaptation or anything–the Arnold film does take liberties he can list from memory. “Is it exactly Howard’s Conan? No, of course not. But that was my first exposure to Conan, like it was millions of people’s first exposure. It serves as the gateway that brings you down the rabbit hole, where you read the comics and then the Robert E. Howard stories.” His test for any adaptation is whether the core character makes it through intact.

The Love Runs Deep

The other half spans the tabletop worlds Fred built in the nineties to go toe-to-toe with Warhammer and D&D: Mutant Chronicles, Mutant: Year Zero, Kult, Chronopia. Marcos didn’t meet those names in an onboarding packet. He grew up inside exactly that tradition, noting that Warhammer, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering were big influences “in [his] life”. The rabbit hole ran deep enough that he’d played Siege of the Citadel, the Mutant Chronicles board game, and he knew Chronopia by reputation years before either property was his responsibility. 

So when the company offered its traditional three-year-anniversary commission (any drawing you want from one of our comic artists) there was no deliberation. “There was only one answer”: Conan as a Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine, savage as ever, with the Lion of Aquilonia worked in and the barbarian necklaces intact. It hangs in his office near an original Adrian Smith Savage Sword cover painting he bought because his childhood demanded it.

So when he talks about his love of these types of IPs, it’s native speech. Kull is “my favorite non-Conan Robert E. Howard character,” and there is “some cool Kull stuff cooking up” with announcements aimed at San Diego Comic-Con. He pitched Kult to us, unprompted, as “Hellraiser meets the Matrix meets Gnostic philosophy,” and described Mutant: Year Zero as a “Wind in the Willows meets Mad Max…that’s so weird, but it’s so great.” His standing invitation to Conan readers: “Go to our website and start poking around the other IPs. If you’re a fan of cool sci-fi fantasy worlds,” something in the vault will catch you.

The Job, As He Understands It

Marcos used to tell a joke about his career, that it was “an exercise in finding the thing I hate least to do.” He assumed loving your job happened to other people, then took a flier on working in an industry he was genuinely stoked about. “And now I love my job. I’m excited to go to work on Monday and see the latest comic book art.”

He’s clear-eyed about what the title carries. “This job has responsibility from Fred and the company, but also responsibility to the fans. I’m just going to try my best to live up to the expectations that have been placed on me.” His theory of how that works is the one this company has run on for years: serve the hardcore readers first, because “the hardcore fans are your preachers. Their passion is infectious.” He intends to be reachable while he does it: you can find him as @KingCronan, where he answers what he can and dodges what he must.

We’ve quoted maybe a tenth of the conversation. The rest covers his case for Hyperborea, an unfinished Howard fragment about Kush he’d love to develop, and the ending he’d want for a King Conan story. 

The full interview is coming to the Conan YouTube channel, so we advise you to subscribe now so that you’re there when it drops.