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Filed under the category "You Can't Go Home Again," Al Attles, the coach of the Golden State Warriors' lone championship team, once found himself back at his alma mater, Weequahic High School in Newark, N.J.

If you are of a certain age -- in your 30s or maybe early 40s -- odds are good you'll remember "V," NBC's 1980s sci-fi saga about aliens who come to Earth promising peace but turn out to be lizards in disguise keen on making humanity their food supply.

It was 1963, and Norman Bridwell, the father of an infant daughter, was broke and desperately searching for work as a commercial artist in New York City.

Most of us have never wanted to go to Turkmenistan, nor could we find it on a map. But the graphic novel "Joe and Azat" ($10.95, NBM/ComicsLit) depicts it as an awfully interesting place.

"HEARTBREAK ON VINYL," Blake Lewis (Tommy Boy)

Rather than attempt to be everything to everyone, like so many other "American Idol" contenders try to do, Blake Lewis is honing in on a specific sound.

Tom Weschler was a 15-year-old musician and band manager in Detroit when he first ran into Ed "Punch" Andrews, a local entertainment mogul, in 1965. Andrews was managing up-and-coming Detroit rocker Bob Seger, and Weschler, who had saved his money from a car-wash job to buy a Nikon camera, asked if his band could play at a local club Andrews owned.

A guide to movies from a family perspective:

"Astro Boy"

-- Rated: PG.

-- Suitable for: First-graders and up.

-- What you should know: Set in the future, this is an animated story about a scientist who creates Astro Boy to replace the son, Toby, who has died. He has Toby's memories, plus superpowers.

In film after film in the 1930s, from "Frankenstein" to "The Mummy" to "The Ghoul" and on and on, actor Boris Karloff functioned as a sort of wanderer -- an explorer -- in the shadow land between life and death.

If the movies he inhabited sometimes were considered juvenile, the subject matter that motivated them couldn't have been more adult, more profound.

Oren Peli is Red Bull in human form. His movie, "Paranormal Activity," is causing more sleepless nights than the Pittsburgh Steelers in overtime on "Monday Night Football."

Frightful programming will haunt most network schedules a full week before Halloween.

AMC, as usual, has the most ambitious -- a marathon of chilling movies. "FearFest" is slated to get under way on Oct. 23 and continue through Halloween, Oct. 31. More than 50 movies are on tap, including "The Fly," "Dracula" and "The Shining."