If your superheroic campaign had a golden age (World War II and thereabouts), Homefront Heroes will be useful for it. Even if you just use the characters and art as inspiration for your campaign’s history and early heroes, it is more than worth the incredibly inexpensive price of this product.

Amazing Stories of World War II: Homefront Heroes for the ICONS Super Role-Playing Game is a 28-page PDF (24 pages less cover, credits and OGL) written by Steve Perrin and published by Vigilance Press.

The layout is a standard, dual column design and eminently readable. The cover and interior art is all full color, some period bits (ration book and coupons) are just flavor but the cover and interior art of the characters, done in four pieces each showing three of the heroes, by Jon Gibbons is quite amazing, almost worth the price of admission alone.

This product begins with a short discussion of the historical and publishing background to the homefront heroes, defining (for the purpose of this work) the golden age of comics, the involvement of the US in World War II (both pre and post Pearl Harbor), and some discussion on what life on the home front was like. Providing a useful, if general, primer to the period and setting.

Next come the heart of the book, twelve archetypes for the classic sorts of homefront heroes. Seven of which are taken from the original golden age comics and include such characters as: the Genius Kid, the 4F (someone who failed their medical exam to get into the military) and Other than Human (ghosts, spirits and aliens). The last five are from the modern look back upon the golden age and include: the Minority Hero, the Pacifist and the Rosie the Riveter-type heroine. A satisfactorily wide range of options.

Each of the archetypes is given a completely written out hero or heroine to demonstrate how they work (and each also refers to classic comic book characters that fall within that archetype). All of these are quite fun from Captain Awesome, the genius kid with his roller skates and slingshot, to the crime fighting White Lady and the ghostly Brother Survivor. A wide and varied mix of inspiring characters for the setting.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThruRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.