Money.  Some guys who were in the right place at the right time and knew the right people literally became millionaires overnight, and then the golden goose died just as quickly...boom/bust cycle, speculators almost killed the industry.  "Image" has become the buzzword for everything wrong about the comic industry at that time but at the end of the day, pretty much everyone who had the opportunity to make ridiculous money back then was doing so.  That's the name of the game.  Don't get caught up in all of the tales of guys doing it "for the love," "for the fans."  They're doing it for the same reasons everyone else gets up and does whatever they do - to make a living and secure their futures.  I spoke with a Big Name Artist back then who was very critical of Image, who had secured a creator-owned deal with another publisher and openly bragged to me about how much he was earning from a concept that has been criticized as being as derivative as the Image comics he mocked and denigrated.  So everyone was trying to get their piece of the financial pie back then and I think some folks were jealous/envious/resentful of the success of original Image creators based upon what some considered to be bad comics and worse business practices. 

To be fair, many things about Image made it easy to hate them at the time...that was a long time ago though to hold onto the hatred.

Two points: I created NEXT MEN at Dark Horse before the Image boys left Marvel, and (dear God how many times must this be repeated??) Image began as an imprint at Malibu, not as an independent company.

John Farnham, most of the stuff aimed at Image's business practices that I have heard about seem actually more to do with Rob Leifeld's business practices at the time.

He'd create a book, launch it with his name on it so it would sell but have inferior artwork (Leifeld may not have been a good artist but the guys working under him were really not good), subsequent issues would be late but the retailers would be on the hook for them (as in they had to keep those late books in mind for their budget so theoretically couldn't spend that budget on other books), released title after title to capitalize on the speculators who'd pick up anything with a number one, and made a boatload of cash in a way that was detrimental to the overall business of comics (hurt the retailers, hurt the fans, hurt the other companies). And then you add in that a lot of people genuinely didn't like the man (for good and bad reasons) and through that it created an image of Image that wasn't true for all of the seven (though others did some things as well).

My little brother was a huge Liefeld fan, and was excited every time a new Image Liefeld comic was announced. Then he'd read it and kind of like it but not really. Then he looked around and realized all of the Liefeld Image comics he was buying pretty much blew chunks and one day he just stopped buying comics. I think that happened to a fair number of people in the nineties. People have called it a speculator crisis (where all the speculators left at once) but I also think there was a reader crisis when a lot of people just realized a lot of their comics (Image, DC and Marvel were all chasing the speculators and all producing some crap) weren't worth reading.

As for the other people in Image. MacFarlane did a book that he wanted to do, while not something I liked (or to be honest even understand what the hell was going on and why the hell I should care), it sold well and people seemed to like it. The reason people have a problem with MacFarlane seems to be more of a personality conflict than anything else; big mouth with a big ego (I personally find guys like that funny and fun to be around but others have a problem with it). Nobody seems to dislike Jim Lee too much, but Wildcats just wasn't very good, same with Silvestri's Cyberforce. Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon has been one of the best comic books produced in the last seventeen years. But um..., and I say this with affection, Erik can be a little prickly and agressive at times.

The Wizard hype machine didn't help (being told something is awesome when it isn't can wear people out), Image's clearing out of the second wave seemed strange to me (though it seems like they came to understand it was a mistake and the company as it is now might not have been formed without making that mistake and trying to correct it).

Basically they made mistakes that hurt the industry, but they were young guys trying to do their own thing and learning on the job. Nothing wrong with that.

If they'd just said; we want to own our own creations and work for ourselves, earning whatever our names, talent and creativity allow us to make, that would have been fine. I think it was the rhetoric that blatantly contradicted some of their actions that got people angry at them.

But it lingers, even with a guy like me who didn't buy those early crappy Image comics (I read my brother's), I still only buy one Image comic on a regular basis and while I've sampled a few here and there I find myself almost reading it looking for the same flaws I saw back then (nice art, incomprehensible stories, no reason for the comic to exist because it has nothing to say) and they need to be better than an equivalent Marvel or DC comic for me not to find those flaws (because unfortunately if you look hard enough you can find flaws in everything).

In other words, for me Image still has to overcome my preconceptions even though intellectually I know those flaws are no longer as prevalent as they once were and there are quite a few comics that I might like. And honestly might be buying if they were under a different brand name.

I think the Name Withheld letter pissed off a lot of people, too. It was seen (somewhat unfairly perhaps) as basically slamming every writer in the industry as expendable hacks that had nothing to do with the success of any given book. Oh and the Peter David - Todd Mcfarlane debate. Man, it was like watching Mike Tyson beat up a 5-year old and steal his candy. I'm telling you, the comics industry in the early nineties was a damn warzone.

A Fun Fact about that debate -- after the Toddler had his head handed to him by David, he had his "people" get in touch with me to see if / wanted to "debate" him. My response: I said I didn't recall anything about the McFarlane/David debate that stated John Byrne gets to debate the loser.

Well, hyperbole. Not an even fight, was my point. McFarlane is smart, but he's not word smart.