This is a waste of a perfectly good ficticious super hero.

In a move reminiscent of storylines developed during the World War II, the U.N. is joining forces with Marvel Comics, creators of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, to create a comic book showing the international body working with superheroes to solve bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.

The UN has to resort to fiction to bolster its image because a book about the UN doing any good would by definition have to be a work of fiction.

The comic, initially to be distributed free to 1 million U.S. schoolchildren, will be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature superheroes such as Spider-Man working with U.N. agencies such as Unicef and the “blue hats,” the U.N. peacekeepers.

Why not set the book in an actual war-torn country and highlight the heroic acts of real, actual US military men and women to help the people who live there? There is no shortage of those real heroes. We don’t need to credit their deeds to made-up comic book characters.

But for the UN to do that would be to admit that there are real heroes in the world that the UN has done all it can to oppose. So there goes that.

In the whole story about the UN enlisting Spider-Man et al to burnish its pathetic image, we get one bit of truth.

Although the U.N. did not come up with the initiative, the measure could help revive the body’s troubled image in the U.S., where relations have been strained, in particular during president Bush’s administration.

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., once said that “if the U.N. building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

They should make a comic book about a super hero called Mustache Man. I just might buy that one.