One of the best things anyone saw at Thursday’s Conan the Barbarian: Beyond the Comics panel at San Diego Comic Con wasn’t on the schedule.

As the hour closed, the screen cut to Genndy Tartakovsky, alone on camera, with a request for a hall full of Conan fans:

“Hello, Conan fans. My name is Genndy Tartakovsky, and I would like to read you something.”

What followed was the director of Primal and Samurai Jack reading Robert E. Howard aloud, specifically Bêlit’s mating-dance from “Queen of the Black Coast,” when she danced on a deck still wet from the battle that brought Conan aboard the Tigress. The lines read:

‘As they moved out over the glassy blue deep, Bêlit came to the poop. Her eyes were burning like those of a she-panther in the dark as she tore off her ornaments, her sandals and her silken girdle and cast them at his feet. Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: “Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance: the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!”

And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death. Her white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her. Then, as the white stars glimmered through the blue velvet dusk, making her whirling body a blur of ivory fire, with a wild cry she threw herself at Conan’s feet, and the blind flood of the Cimmerian’s desire swept all else away as he crushed her panting form against the black plates of his corseleted breast.’

As he finished, he said simply, “Well, that is from ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ and how can you not want to make this?”

“I Imagined Everything As I Read It”

“As soon as I started to read the books, I just fell in love with that kind of imagery,” Tartakovsky said. “I imagined everything as I read it. All fully animated, all done. And when the opportunity came, I of course had to do it.”

The opportunity he means is the Conan the Barbarian animated series announced in June, built on “Queen of the Black Coast”.

“We’re developing it,” he confirmed. “We’re working hard with our partners at Prime Video and Warner Bros. Animation, and I’m so excited about it all. It’s going to be something special.”

He also managed to say in one sentence what fans have suspected for years: “I feel like Primal was kind of a primer in getting us ready to do Conan.”

Next Year

He signed off by thanking fans “for all the support and kind words”,  but not before leaving the room with the closest thing to a promise you will get from a director this deep in development and this far from a release date:

“Hopefully, maybe next year I’ll see you at Comic-Con. Maybe show you some things. Who knows? We’ll see how it goes.”

If You’re Still at Comic Con

Conan the Barbarian: Tides of the Tyrant-King! runs Saturday, July 25 at 3:00 PM in Room 28DE. 

For everything on the Tartakovsky series as it develops, follow Heroic Signatures on Instagram and YouTube.