Now Kathryn Murdoch Joins James Murdoch in AWA

By Rich Johnston, Bleeding Cool

Now Kathryn Murdoch joins James Murdoch in AWA April 2025 solicits and solicitations… is this a Succession situation?

Article Summary

• Kathryn Murdoch and Ari Wallach launch Futurific Studios to create protopian storytelling across platforms.
• Ari Wallach stars in PBS docuseries “A Brief History of the Future,” produced by the new studio.
• AWA and Futurific Studios introduce “The Protopias Collection” comics spotlighting hopeful futures.
• First comic “Polis” by Mark Russell explores a floating refugee city as a beacon of hope amid disasters.

Futurific Studios is a production company founded by Kathryn Murdoch and Ari Wallach, to “bring together storytellers, technologists, artists, and scientists to create realistic, thriving worlds and societies that can exist across multiple platforms. We believe that if we can imagine better worlds, we can build them.”

Ari Wallach is a professional futurist and starts in the PBS docuseries A Brief History of the Future, produced by Murdoch and Wallach’s company. Murdoch calls it a “protopian” perspective and says she has been dismayed by the deficit of hope that she has found in contemporary storytelling, particularly when it comes to young adult fiction. She told Variety, “For some reason, we’ve stopped telling hopeful stories. And we only tell the story about how awful it’s all going to be. When I met with Ari, who is an actual futurist, when we started talking about doing a show like this, it just felt incredibly important at this moment in time.”

Executive producer Kathryn Murdoch is married to James Murdoch, eldest son of Rupert Murdoch. James is also one of the investors behind AWA, the comic book publisher set up by former Marvel executives Axel Alonso and Bill Jemas. AWA has been known for publishing idiosyncratic creator-owned comics by big names such as J Michael Straczynski, Mike Deodato, Garth Ennis, Ronda Rousey, Frank Cho and Mark Russell. 

Now, AWA is publishing a series of comic books as The Protopias Collection, in association with Futurific Studios. And that will highlight stories set in futures that are not perfect but incrementally better than today, saying, “We believe that if we can imagine better worlds, we can build them.” And it begins with Polis, the first of the The Protopias Collection from AWA and Futurific, a one-shot comic by Mark Russell and Laci, to be published in April. Mark is best known for his satirical political takes using classic comic book and cartoon characters such as The Flintstones, Snagglepuss, Red Sonja and currently Marvel’s X-Men spinoff comic, X-Factor. And we have a listing and preview right here.

POLIS (ONE SHOT)
ARTISTS WRITERS & ARTISANS INC | FEB251418
(W) Mark Russell (A) Laci (CA) Mike Choi
Welcome to Protopias, the new science-fiction anthology series from Futurific Studios (PBS’s A Brief History of the Future) and AWA that explores the many possible futures that can come to pass as we try to make the right choices in imperfect realities. In this double-sized debut issue, “Polis,” Eisner and Ringo Award-winning writer Mark Russell (Not All Robots, Batman: Dark Age) spins the tale of Miragua, a floating city populated by refugees that has become a beacon of hope in a world beset by climate disaster and civil war. Follow Florida teen Natalie as she emigrates from the only home she’s ever known in search of a better life aboard Miragua. Features a foreword by renowned futurist Ari Wallach and supplemental material laying out the science behind the story, showing how this world could come to be. In Shops: Apr 02, 2025

Wallach also told Variety. “the issues we’re facing as a species on planet Earth are not going to be fixed in six months, nor did they come about in the past six months. We know that technology alone is not the answer. We need the social and political systems around those things in order to make them function. What we wanted to do was first to show that it’s not just about technology. It’s also about making systems work, like our democracy for example. But to also just allow that it’s not a binary of ‘AI is going to be terrible, or ‘AI is going to be wonderful.’ It’s actually about stepping back and thinking, ‘What do I want out of this?’ What’s the ultimate goal? Where do we want to get to? And then how would I use AI to do that? Or how do we train AI to be better? We’re often told as a society, ‘Here’s what failure looks like.’ I just went to a theater and watched one of those movies. But if you keep hitting that button over and over again, eventually we just become numb to it and we lose the imaginatory muscle of what that success actually looks like. And that’s part of the show, and very much the mission and mandate of Futurific Studios.”