EUGENE (AP) — Comic book superheroes such as Superman and Batman used to be little more than a guilty pleasure in American life, a cheap diversion loved by children and looked down on by their parents.

No longer. For years now, the art world has embraced comic books — especially the original sketches behind those early superhero comics — as a compelling form of visual art.

To see how seriously comics are being taken today, you need only look at exhibits such as “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics” now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Now Superman and his crime-fighting allies are setting up shop at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

“Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero” runs through Jan. 3 at the Schnitzer, on the University of Oregon campus.

The exhibition features more than 150 pages of superhero comic art from the 1940s to the present, including several complete stories.

The show is curated by University of Oregon English professor Ben Saunders. It grew out of an academic conference he is organizing in October to examine the role of superheroes in society.

“It always frustrates me when academics don’t give you anything to look at,” he said.

Saunders originally had in mind a rather smaller exhibition for the art museum. Then he was introduced to the museum staff.

“To my surprise, they liked the idea and have run with it. It’s become a much bigger exhibition than conference.”

That’s at least in part because Jill Hartz, the museum’s new executive director, saw an opportunity to put on an original exhibit that features work by a UO faculty member and is likely to draw an entirely new crowd through the museum’s doors.

“We are looking at this as a three-generational show,” she said. “Superman is 70 years old. We have a big age range here of people interested, from fans of the traditional comics when they first came out to people knowing the characters from the film.”

“Superheroes” will include original art from some of the most influential comics in history: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, all the way through today’s Hellboy.

It also will include a rare copy of Action Comics No. 1, the 1938 comic that started it all, which is on loan from Darrell Grimes, who bought it at auction in 1980. Grimes is a comic collector and owns two comic book stores in Eugene.

Grimes was reluctant, at first, to take the comic book out of the safety deposit box where he keeps it.

“I am a little bit shy about letting people know what I have,” he said. “The people at the museum worked on me for a couple of months to get me to loan it to them. They are extremely nice. That’s what won me over. They had me walk through the museum. They said, ‘You know, honestly, this is going to be safer than your safe deposit box.’ As we were walking along, they were pointing out paintings worth $10 million. I’m thinking, ‘Wow. Holy cow!’”

He also is lending copies of Superman No. 1, from 1939, and Famous Funnies No. 1, which came out in 1934 and was one of the first successful comics ever printed.

At the other end of the spectrum is collector David Mandel, a former writer for the TV sitcom “Seinfeld” and now executive producer of the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

He is lending the complete interior art from Amazing Spider-Man No. 26, by Steve Ditko; the cover of Giant Size X-Men No. 1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum; the cover of Iron Man No. 1 by Gene Colan; the cover of Fantastic Four No. 59 by Jack Kirby; and Hellboy art by Mike Mignola.

Other artists represented in the exhibit include Neal Adams, C.C. Beck, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Lou Fine,  and Ramona Fradon.

An exhibit catalog will be released this fall with essays by Saunders, Diana Schultz, Michael T. Gilbert, Charles Hatfield and Rebecca Wanzo, as well as biographies of the major artists.

The art in “Superheroes” is almost all owned by private collectors. That means this show is a rare opportunity to see the work.

“This art was not valued even by the publishers until the later 1960s,” Saunders says. “And not even then, in some cases. No one was really preserving it except for private collectors. The challenge was getting private collectors, who spent a lot of time and money acquiring these works, to let us borrow them.”

One of the interesting things about the show is seeing how various individual artists contributed to the development of the characters, the professor says.

“Part of the reason you can convince talented people to work on these figures, even though the work will end up being owned by Marvel or DC, is that it’s like someone gives you the most fantastic toy ever and says you can play with it, so long as you don’t break it. You get to add your own little wrinkle to the mythology. And you become a major figure in the creative process.”