Geektopia: Rick Custer’s Long Way Back to His First Love

ETX Uncovered · Kilgore, TX · Published June 27, 2026 

If you'd asked me about Geektopia a month ago, I'd have told you it was the comic shop in Kilgore that throws Geekend.

That's the part that reaches you. Geekend is a two-day downtown event with costume contests and a Naruto run and a scavenger hunt for comics hidden in storefronts — the kind of thing that fills a feed every spring. I knew it came from Geektopia. I knew Geektopia sold comics. Past that, I had nothing. A name on a banner and a guess.

Here’s the story I found.

Rick Custer is a man who spent thirty years taking the long way back to a record store. He owns Geektopia — 207, in the old Max Daiches building downtown — and yes, it sells comics. It also sells books, art, games, DVDs, and now, finally, new vinyl. The comics were only ever part of it. The records are the part his heart was waiting on, and after three decades of building, he's letting himself have them.

Record Store Dreams

Rick first opened in this same building around 2013, as a comic shop called RC Comics. When his mother's health began to fail, he closed up to take care of her. He came back in 2020 — not the greatest timing — and through some stroke of luck landed in the very space he'd had before. He reopened as Geektopia and decided that this time he'd carry anything he thought was cool. Comics, books, art, games, whatever caught him.

But records came first. When Rick was a kid, his mother kept them — mostly fragile 78s he wasn't allowed to touch, and albums he was. He'd put one on and just listen, and somewhere in there the fascination set in for good. When he got old enough to imagine owning a store, the first thing he pictured was a record shop.

The trouble was timing. By the time he was ready, records were dead and CDs were following them out the door. Opening a record store would have been a good way to go broke. So he went to his second love instead — books — selling his own collection online, then remainder titles, then comics at flea markets when the books slowed down.

Each pivot was a workaround for the one he couldn't make yet. The name itself was a gift: a guy named James Draper, who still runs the Kilgore Current, once told Rick he'd always wanted to throw a Comic-Con and call it Geektopia. Rick remembered it.

Everything Is a Work in Progress

Ask Rick what Geektopia is and the honest answer is that it depends on the week. The store has been a comic shop, a hangout lounge, a gaming spot, and now something closer to a record store with deep roots in everything else. He says it plainly: it is a work in progress, constantly evolving. That isn't a flaw in the plan. It is the plan.

He learned the hard way that no single thing carries a store on its own. The comics taught him that. So did the collapse of Diamond, the distributor that once had a stranglehold on Marvel and DC and then went bankrupt and lost both. Rick watched that happen and decided he wasn't going to spend his life chasing the big two. He'd keep back issues, keep what sold, and build a place with enough variety that no one bad season could sink it.

Today that means four real sections — comics, records, books, DVDs — plus the odd corners that surprise even him. He took a stack of donated VHS tapes mostly to be polite, put them out for sale, and they moved. "They have really sold," he said, still a little amazed by it. People don't even own players anymore. They buy them anyway.

The First Love Comes Back Around

And then the thing he'd been waiting on quietly happened. Records came back. Not as nostalgia for people his age, but as something younger buyers wanted — a physical object they could hold in a world that had gone all the way digital. Rick saw the signs, asked himself if it was finally time, and decided it was.

His first order of new vinyl arrived a few weeks before we talked, and he tore into the boxes the day they showed up. Mostly colored vinyl, which is the new thing, plus some of the heavier 180-gram pressings that play better. The back wall now has a hand-lettered sign sorting it all out: top row, new colored and premium vinyl; bottom row, vintage. There are dividers for rock, jazz, hip hop, country, gospel, 70s pop. Within days of putting them out, with no advertising beyond a Facebook post, he'd already sold one — a Nas record, on colored vinyl, to a younger guy. For Rick that single sale was proof of the whole bet.

Record Store Day, the national release event every April, is the new north star. He's thinking about pulling his own long-running spring event up to meet it, maybe building a record show around the date. After thirty years of running the long way around, he's finally pointed straight at it.

Built for the Block, Not Just the Store

What's easy to miss about Rick is how much of what he does isn't really about Rick. Back in 2014 he started an event called Geekend, built off Free Comic Book Day, and grew it into a two-day downtown affair with costume contests, a Naruto run for the kids, stick pony races, and a comic-book scavenger hunt with clues pointing to which stores hid the prizes. He handed the city a reason to do more downtown, and they did. When the city wanted to let go of its early-December market, Rick took it over and folded it into the holiday season's close.

That instinct shows up in the small decisions too. His main artist, Brett Mitchell, has work all over the walls — Bettie Page, Venom, a fire-breathing Charizard — and Brett is also the reason Rick can keep Geekend running at all, because he'll work the event on the ground while Rick minds the store. When the ice cream and music shop down the street started carrying a toy line Rick was eyeing, he backed off rather than compete with a neighbor. Even the music playing in Geektopia comes from the local rock station just down the road, run by Chuck Conrad, who also owns the broadcast museum a few doors down.

There's a used-record shop on the next block, too, and Rick is careful about that. He doesn't pretend there's no overlap. He sells new pressings; the other guy sells vintage. "A record shop by itself will not make it," Rick said — the same thing he told that owner when he opened. You've got to have other stuff. It's the lesson Rick built his whole store around.

Asking AI, Trusting the Room

Rick will be the first to tell you he's not current on everything. He knows comics, no doubt. Records, after years away, he's had to relearn — what sells now, which genres matter, where a younger crowd's head is at. So he's leaned on AI as a research partner. He gave it a list, asked what to focus on going forward, and it told him records over video games, which were too hard to source and going digital anyway. He liked that answer because it matched what he already felt.

He's also learned where the machine doesn't know his town. When it told him to cut the country records from an order, he pushed back — he was, after all, standing in Texas, where the old country his mother raised him on is coming back around just like everything else from that era. AI is a starting point. What people actually carry to his counter is the real answer. 

That openness isn't only about data. His oldest son is into the hard stuff — screamo, death metal — and keeps after Rick to give it a real chance. Rick will tell you honestly it isn't his thing, not yet. But he doesn't dismiss it, and he doesn't pretend his own taste is the only one that counts. He'll consider stocking it because someone he cares about loves it, and because the whole point of the store is making room for what other people are into, not just what he is. It's the same instinct that runs through everything he does.  He's paying attention to the people around him, and he takes what they want seriously.

Why I Interviewed Rick

A month ago, Geektopia was a name on a Geekend banner to me — the comic shop that throws the event. That was the loud part, the part built to reach people, and it worked. But the brightest signal isn't always the whole story. What I found inside was a man who'd spent thirty years taking the long way back to a record store, building three other businesses in the meantime because the one he wanted couldn't survive yet — and who is finally, carefully, letting himself have it.

There's a print above the couch in his listening studio titled Boulevard of Broken Dreams.  The dream he's chasing now isn't broken or behind him. It just had to wait for the world to come back around to it — and for a man patient enough, and open enough, to still be standing there when it did.

ETX Uncovered exists to tell the story behind the businesses we may or may not know across East Texas. So whether you already know Rick or this is the first you've heard of Geektopia, go by and check out the newest record collection. You’ll be glad you did.

Know a business owner building something meaningful in East Texas? I'd love to hear about them.

Rick Custer owns Geektopia at 207 E Main St in downtown Kilgore — comics, records, books, art, and gaming, open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 to 8. Find Geektopia in the ETX Discovered directory .