How about a few new stories based on and starring the original characters from HG Wells or other 'old british sci-fi books'.
No updates, actually set in the past, in the time they were intended to be, perhaps written by Ian Edginton, drawn by D'Israeli ?
One presumes copyright has even expired on these old things ?
It would be cool to see Edginton & Dâ??Israeli tackle either the original or write new stories of The Invisible Man, & The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Iâ??d quite like to see them take on Fu-Manchu, or The strange case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, both would look great in the Stickleback art style.
Within the UK and all other countries of the EU, and also within Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Norway and Romania, the works of H.G. Wells remain in copyright until 31 December 2016.
Within Brazil however, the copyright only lasts another few days spookily enough, until 31 December 2006, so it's OK if you wanna read any new stories in Portuguese.
Does that mean you need to ask for permission? In the League Of Extraordinary Gentleman film the invisible man is a thief who stole the formula, though Alan Moore uses Griffin.
ADE
Fu-Manchu's name has copyright problems because of the films from the 40s. The movie version of the Invisible Man was another invisiblee because of similar movie related copyright problems with the 1930s Invisible Man movie -I thought he might be a steal from another piece of fiction, and i was sure I'd heard that somewhere, though looking in wikipedia it seems they just made a new one up.
Yet another reason why they had no fucking clue what they were doing with the property.
On a related note I tried to find out what the copyright status of HP Lovecrafts works were a while back, and just came up with a tangled gloopy mess.
Link: If I infringe Lovecraftian copyrights will my soul