HurriCon, a now-biannual fundraiser event for the Bethany Congregational Church, was founded by community member David Donovan in 2018. My best friend Cassidy and I talk about HurriCon, a local benefit comic-con in East Rockaway, Long Island like it’s the event of the season. To us, it is. Limited to the space of a church gymnasium, this “con” is both the smallest and the friendliest comics event I’ve ever attended. I rarely go to a con while also looking forward to meeting strangers, but, at HurriCon, I realized those small encounters can actually be what makes a convention truly special. HurriCon is the best of what loving comics can create — a community, and a supportive one at that.
It doesn’t hurt that it has a truly bangin’ fundraiser raffle.
The name “HurriCon” comes from the event’s original purpose: to raise money to fix the church’s floors, which were damaged in the wake of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Bethany Church—to which I have no affiliation beyond a love for this event—was a community hub after Sandy, which devastated homes and lives, and the church opened its doors to serve as a donation center and more.
The original HurriCon was certainly a success, raising enough money to renovate the damaged floors, and David Donovan has returned year in and year out to organize HurriCon. Alongside his wife Linda, they continue fundraising for the church and community they so clearly love.
I became aware of HurriCon only in 2022 when I moved home to Long Island after finishing grad school in the Midwest. It’s a tale of mutual friends, as these small communities often are. My best friend’s cousin helps out at HurriCon because he’s friends with the Donovans’ son. So Cassidy knew about HurriCon through her cousin, and we attended together in the fall of 2022—and immediately made plans to attend again in June 2023, the event’s next date.
Cassidy unfortunately ended up having a conflict on June 17th, HurriCon’s first fundraiser for 2023, but that didn’t stop her from having a major presence at the event. In the week leading up to the show, the HurriCon Instagram account began promoting the benefit raffle, which included dozens of comics and pop culture paraphernalia, all donated by friends of David and HurriCon itself.
Now, it’s important that you know—as the attendees and vendors of HurriCon soon also discovered—that Cassidy is a huge Poison Ivy fan. It’s, like, a whole thing. So when the HurriCon Instagram account announced that the raffle would include a copy of Batman #181, Poison Ivy’s first appearance, Cassidy and I had a very intelligent conversation about it over DMs.
So, on June 17th, 2023, with a wallet full of cash specifically intended for Cassidy’s raffle tickets—and some extra cash for me to buy whatever Kirby Fourth World issues I could find—I paid the five-dollar donation and entered Bethany Congregational Church’s gymnasium. It was time for HurriCon.
The “con” is more of a show floor than a convention. Inside the church’s small gymnasium, about a dozen vendors had set up shop for the single day: locals selling their comic and toy collections, a few artists taking commissions, and other local artists and crafters selling their wares. I was there just as much as a comics fan (and low-key collector) as I was to “cover” the event, so I immediately made my way to the first booth with short boxes—where David first found me.
David Donovan—a stocky Long Island man with children around my own age—is genuinely one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, and I feel lucky that he spent some of his time chatting with me on the phone just days before he hosted this event. It was clear how excited he was (and is) by the attention—not only on him and the event but on the church itself, which he’s been attending since he was young. HurriCon, to him, is all about giving back to the church and the community.
David (and he insisted I call him David!) has also been reading comics since he was young, as he told me on the phone. He was welcomed into the world of comics as a young man, and I could feel that welcoming spirit in Bethany’s gymnasium. David greeted me with a hug within five minutes of my arrival, and before long I was being introduced to his friends and family around the room, including his 92-year-old mother and a young girl who, just like me, was an avid superhero comics reader. It seemed like everyone there, from the vendors to the attendees, knew either David or someone else in the room; the cross-chatter wasn’t just about comic- or toy-collecting, but also about local businesses and family events and in-jokes and David himself.
I, too, eventually became one of the in-jokes at HurriCon—or, to be more specific, Cassidy did. As promised, after chatting with the Donovan family, I made my way to the raffle table, where I bought an enormous string of 25 raffle tickets on Cassidy’s behalf. It’s hard not to notice some lady stuffing a single raffle bucket—which was a small see-through take-out container with a slit in its lid—with over two dozen tickets, especially considering it took me probably about ten minutes to go through the whole process of buying tickets, writing the contact info on each individual scrap of paper, and then pushing them, one-by-one, agonizingly slowly, into the container on top of that precious, precious copy of Batman #181.
So, yes. People noticed me, and they knew—they knew—just how much I was after that particular raffle prize.
But the raffle wasn’t taking place until the end of the event, and I still had some time to kill and some shortboxes to dig through. At other comic shows—cons and otherwise—this usually means keeping my head down and doing my best to nudge people out of my personal space. Vendors at New York Comic Con and the like are too overwhelmed or exhausted to talk to you (and, frankly, the feeling is mutual).
At HurriCon, though, I chatted with almost every vendor there, including one man who told me stories about working for Neal Adams (yes, that Neal Adams), another who gave me a small discount because I mentioned how much I was loving Chip Zdarsky’s current Batman run, and another, Joe, who I had met at another Long Island comic show and remembered because we’re both from the same town.
I ended up chatting with Joe—about our town, about collecting comics, about Cassidy’s great desire for that Poison Ivy comic—for at least twenty minutes. Actually, I spent most of my time at HurriCon talking with other people and not only about comics. It was, maybe, the first time I had experienced a con as an actual convention—a group of like-minded people convening around something they love. For HurriCon, that loved-thing could be comics, or it could be David and the Donovan family, or it could be Bethany Congregational Church, or it could be some combination of the three.
Cassidy and I attended our first HurriCon because we love comics, but I came back—with the express purpose of writing about the coming back—because of how much genuine care and community spirit I could feel at play in that small room.
After Joe and I parted ways—my stack of comics a little heavier and my wallet a good deal lighter—I spent the last of my cash on a few DC trades and waited for the raffle to begin. I won’t bore you with the details of the whole raffle. Instead, I’ll jump to the end: no, dear reader, Cassidy did not win Batman #181, despite the number of tickets both I and her cousin Chris dumped into that little take-out container on her behalf.
(You will be happy to know, though, that Chris, pictured above with David, won some art, and I won a David Bowie graphic novel. Not all of us are losers like Cassidy!)
A good few people threw me some sympathetic looks—I told you these raffle tickets became a bit of a thing throughout the afternoon—and David literally apologized to me after he pulled the winning ticket. But neither Cassidy nor I were upset—the money was going to a good cause, after all. And the community-minded nature of HurriCon paid off when Joe pulled me aside after the raffle.
It turns out he had also just gotten ahold of Batman #181, and he said he would be happy to contact me with the details — as well as a good deal. About a week after the event, he did just that, and Cassidy is now the proud owner of that single issue.
HurriCon isn’t the biggest comics event on Long Island, but it has the biggest heart, and I’ve met some of the kindest comics people through these two weekends that I’ve attended. There’s so much more I could say about it—about the church, about the people, and about my own experience growing up as a young woman in comics and on Long Island and how this event challenges all of those experiences—but I’d rather leave on this thought: attending HurriCon, more than any other comic book-themed event I’ve ever attended, makes me feel part of a singular comics community made all the more special by being, quite literally, close to home.
At this event, comic books are a reason to give back, are a reason to support other people, are a reason to connect with people simultaneously different from me and among my own local community. In the days after HurriCon, David messaged me to let me know that they reached their fundraising goal for the church. I can’t wait to help them do the same this coming November when HurriCon again takes over Bethany Congregational Church. Who knows who I’ll meet next—and just how many raffle tickets I’ll buy. Hopefully, this time Cassidy can stuff a take-out container herself.
