As I said, beyond the current scope of the project...
I'd like to see what bolt3 looks like... I may have a pretty quick way to do part of it...
Regarding the avatars: the originals look as if they were either drawn or painted. Can that look realistically be achieved using vectors, even with those higher res images as a base? It seems to me that paper tracing and scanning would create a more organic look like the originals.
Then again, I certainly don't have the skills to pull this off, and I won't be disappointed if nobody else wants to.
Not perfectly recreated, no. However, yes repainting the originals WOULD look best... but who the hell has the talent, the hardware, and the time?
How big do they really need to be? I can apply a fractal scale-up to the large version of the originals of it's really necessary.... but there's only so much you can do with an existing image of an existing size.