This week, let’s salute one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes collection covers, before I ship the book off to greener pastures:

Because my wife is a woman of taste, she also loves Calvin and Hobbes. So when I pulled a few boxes of books out of my parents’ basement and brought them to our house, we found that we had a couple duplicate Calvin and Hobbes collections. (We also found a couple Kat didn’t have, which promptly got shelved with their new friends.) Kat’s attached to her collections, and we don’t really need two copies of any of them, so my copies of Weirdos From Another Planet! and The Essential Calvin and Hobbes are hitting the road.

I’m not gonna lie: a lot of the other Calvin and Hobbes collections have better covers than Weirdos. (Yukon Ho! and Essential are probably better and also among my favorites.) But I’ve always had a soft spot for this cover in particular, because it’s just so odd without context. “A boy, a living stuffed tiger, and an alien meet up on Mars … what’s going to happen next?”

Calvin and Hobbes, of course, are the actual weirdos from another planet here. They’ve “invaded” Mars, so the alien is rightly as frightened of them as they are of the alien. Will the little green guy survive his encounter with the Earthling menace? If you’re in Madison, WI and find the right Little Free Library, you might be able to find out. So long, Weirdos.

(Want to check out more posts in the Cool Comic Covers series? If so, click here.)