El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, from co-creators Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua, is a visually inventive, high-octane series that combines superheroes, Mexican folklore and sitcoms. © Nickelodeon.

One of my favorite Nickelodeon cartoons of recent vintage is El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, a visually inventive, high-octane series that combines superheroes, Mexican folklore, slapstick and situation comedies into a zany slice-of-life tale of family and internal conflict.

Yeah, that sounds like an odd mixture, but series co-creators Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua somehow manage to pull everything together into one of the most unusual and entertaining children's cartoons on the air today.

I spoke with Gutierrez about his professional background, the production of El Tigre and how to combine 1980s Mexican punk rock, Frieda Kahlo and Maurice Noble into a single package.

Andrew Farago: Let's do a brief introduction. I'm interviewing you for Animation World Network... I don't know if you're familiar with the site or not --

Jorge Gutierrez: I check it every morning!

AF: Excellent. And you're the co-creator and executive producer of El Tigre, for Nickelodeon.

JG: My wife [Sandra Equihua] is also co-creator and executive producer, so it's both of us.

AF: And that's a great place to start. How did you meet Sandra?

JG: We actually met in high school. She was 17, and I was 18, and we met at a rock concert in Tijuana, Mexico, on the border. And two weeks from the day we met, I proposed marriage. And she said no. (laughs)

And eight years of boyfriend/girlfriend went on, then she finally said yes. So she put up with me when I went to CalArts, and she went off to Graphic Design University in Mexico. Eventually we got married, and I remember telling her, "We're gonna be the Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo of animation!" (laughs) And she kinda went for it, and here we are.

AF: Hopefully you don't end up exactly the same as Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo --

JG: I always tell her, "without the, y'know, cheating and the trains hitting you" part. (laughs)

AF: What was the concert?

Jorge Gutierrez.

JG: It was a punk band called "La Lupita." And that band's not around anymore. But it was great. I remember getting out of the mosh pit and seeing her, seeing Sandra, and that was it. I was in love.

AF: Mexico's music scene has been a big influence on your work, hasn't it?

JG: Oh yeah, definitely. At that point, a lot of bands -- like Café Tacuba and a lot of others, but specifically that one -- what we were seeing happen, in that scene, was that they were taking very traditional folk elements of Mexican culture and mixing them with contemporary sounds.

In our artwork, we kind of started doing that too. We would look at our favorite muralists, and our favorite folk art from Mexico, and try to bring it into the digital era. We'd say, "We're making digital folk art. We're digital artisans." And that's where a lot of the inspiration, and how we still make art today, comes from.

AF: How much of your creative process now is digital?

JG: Most of it is, now. Originally, we drew a lot on paper. But now, like a lot of people, we've become one with drawing with Cintiqs, on the computer screen. And I think that makes you a braver, more daring artist. You don't have to erase anything, and you can "undo." And I think, when you're drawing, your choices get a lot more crazy, since you can undo things, and there's no proof that you went off in a bad direction. So now, we're completely digital.

And we still paint. Sandra still has art shows, and I still paint every once in a while. Just to remind ourselves of where we came from. But for animation, I think we're all digital now.

AF: Cool. Let's backtrack a little bit, and talk about your background. You went to art school as a teenager, but I'm assuming that you were always interested in art?