History
The story of Engelbaum began in the mid 90's online with artist Lynne Triplett as an outlet for her creations and ideas. Going by the online aliases of TRiPPY and Astrima, Lynne began the website under the original name of 'TRiPSiDE'. Her first experiments in website building were utterly horrible (hey it was the 90's) – but along the way through sharing her artwork Lynne began to attract new friends and fans. Lynne later joined the online art community website DeviantArt to promote her artwork and stories there instead under the name of *Astrima.
Whilst at DeviantArt she met Niyazi Sonmez (DiGi Valentine) who found a major interest in her art style. Over time the two became friends and eventually formed a relationship.
Up until 2006, Lynne's stories were present as fan fiction for the fan base that belongs to the old SEGA Saturn game, NiGHTS into Dreams. Lynne also co-owned the fan site NiGHTSintoDreams.com with Niyazi which is dedicated to the game. A decade without a new game meant fans had to make their own fun during that time and Lynne was no exception. Her original concept for the Engelbaum story began as simple fan fiction that was written for the game, under the title 'Windows To A Haunted Mind'. The original story was based around a group of hero characters known as Gens who expanded on the idea behind positive aspects of the human psyche. The Gens all originally began as real life friends of Lynne's and she gave them these Gen titles as gifts. They were also written into her fan created story (WTAHM) and used as RP characters in her old forums. It gained a huge following on its own merit up until news of a new game was announced which forced everyone to take their original creations and rethink their purpose. The fanbase was split into two groups, the NiGHTS game fans – and the TRiPPY's story fans. It was a time of evolution for the fandom in both areas.
Lynne and Niyazi, deciding that they wanted to further what Lynne had created, formed the new name Studio Imagni and started everything from scratch, giving their universe a much needed revamp.
A long period of general soul searching and rethinking took place with many of Lynne's fans fearing that their Gen characters were now obsolete and that the story was to never be continued. But forever stubborn, Lynne decided that some major changes needed to happen in order to save the 10 years of history she had developed – into something entirely new.
Soon after the pair started living together they both sat down and thought about how to take everything original that had been created from fanfiction- and make their own stand alone story. After months of writing and rewriting, they were able to come up with something original and entirely theirs with no connections at all to the first version. This new version of the story had many sources of inspiration, the fandom forum experiences of the NiGHTS into Dreams community being just one of them. Piece by piece things clicked together and a huge new story was born.
Another major aspect that also needed to change was the inclusion of Lynnes real life friends in the story. Due to obvious reasons, having everybody Lynne knew as characters in an official comic would only cause headaches so an entirely new cast of characters were written up instead, with some fond throwbacks to where the characters started. The new story then changed its name from 'Windows To A Haunted Mind' to the singular title of 'Engelbaum', named after the huge tree that featured in the story and translates from German as 'Angel Tree'.
A pilot issue of Engelbaum (Branch 0) was created and proved very popular at conventions with people really taking to the new characters and storyline. This was testing the water for entering the realm of comic books. It was at this point that Lynne also created a new DA account under the name of *Imagni to focus on Engelbaum over fan art.
A few years after Branch 0 Lynne began work at SEGA, ironically working on the 2012 port of NiGHTS into dreams for modern consoles. So she took time out from Engelbaum to give one last show of love to the franchise that she loved so much, both for herself and everyone she had encountered over the years. It was a literal dream come true for her- and the end of an era.
Flip forward to present day and a new name as Spectramis Arts, Lynne left SEGA to work as a freelancer for a short while, but now full time Engelbaum creator thanks to her readers supporting the project through Patreon. Engelbaum is very much always growing, learning and hoping to inspire others to chase their dreams.
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