This book is a bit long-winded, but you could expect that from a tale that is mainly told from the perspective of one man's head. Particularly an intensely introspective, brash, macho, desperate man's head. Nonetheless, it is well animated and well-told. The movie concentrates so much on the habitual activity in already created comfort (which i appreciated for the first half). The book though explains more furtively how he came to live in such an accomodating environment. He has more humble surroundings, and it's more believable. He is also continually dealing with minor problems, like his generator and the meager security for his home. Also, the vampires are not superhuman. They are subhuman, like zombies--assigned to basically harass the living and eat them. They are not rational enough to figure they could burn down his boarded-up house. Rather, they throw rocks at it and call out his name, night after night.
This book really focuses on the neurotic aspect of the legend. One man, the only survivor in a world full of moronic assholes. It's sort of like the contrived existential crisis of your typical teenager, which is probably why this translates so well into a graphic novel. In a strong way, it's just about being lonely. The vampires are just a metaphor for cruel existence. or not, whatever.
The best part about the image, i think, is the really terrifying way the vampires are depicted. There is one, his neighbor, Ben Cortman, who shouts at him every night, "COME OUT NEVILLE!" It slowly drives him insane, to the point where, like in the movie, he confronts the vampire population in kamikaze style, attempting to take out as many as he can with his anger. But it doesn't stop short there. he survives, learns a new modesty, becomes a self-proclaimed "hermit." Then the real interesting concept, ***SPOILER ALERT*** he is visited by a woman claiming to be a survivor. But she's not. She's one of the new race, part of the mutation of vampire-humans who have inherited the earth. He finds himself to be the virus, the one thwart in their new evolution that is killing them off for no reason. It is an unsettling conclusion that the only protagonist becomes the only enemy. And it is brilliant for that, that snap.
I have to say that the title has an actual affect here, rather than the lame utterance given to it for sake of a titular line in the movie. It has credit here. As he realizes he no longer exists, his kind, his purpose. He will by mythologized, and that pain is releasing from the torment of his solitude. It is, unlike the film which cheapened it, an utterance or declaration of death--an absolving of the crap that has made his purgatory so withholding. He has been waiting to prove that the evolution will go on, and finding that it exists he falls prey to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of ambitious explorers: you can't find the new world without being it's new threat. And so his death is the liberation, from his real-world ego to the supreme one which he will be remembered by. the Legend.