No doubt, and probably remain so to this day! It's a drag to acknowledge to myself that my actual tastes refuse to conform to my artistic ideals. I've mentioned here on the board before that Alex Toth, for example, is an artist for whom I can intellectually understand his gifts and impact, but I have no real emotional or aesthetic resonance with.

I think with McFarlane and Silvestri, while it's objectively true that Silvestri is a superior draughtsman and also a cleaner visual storyteller, I just never found his work to be particularly exciting or appealing - probably not helped by my similar aesthetic dislike for Scott Williams. The difference between McFarlane and Silvestri for me is kind of (definitely not drawing an exact parallel, here!) like the difference between Charles Schulz and Hal Foster, just on a visual level. Hal Foster laps Schulz so hard in a drawing competition that it barely seems like they belong to the same medium, but Schulz's stuff was just much more fun to look at.

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Oops!  I have no idea how I did that!

And I didn't mean to say (and I don't think I did) that Silvestri, McFarlane, and the other Image guys were trying to copy Jim Lee.  I think they had similarities and happened to appear (and team up) at the same time, but that Jim Lee was (is) the one of that group that most copiers seemed to try to copy.

There's a lot of artists these days (or a few years ago) who have that thicker line, simplified but sophisticated figure layouts, more stark black/white contrast--like Alex Toth--people like Chris Samnee, Cliff Chiang, Kano, even Bruce Timm and Darwyn Cooke.