Good question and a question I kind of can relate to already (remember when I was the one who seeked your wisdom? PAY DAY! ... no, not really, lol).
I think we can look at this issues from several positions.
Creator
As a creator I have several options on what kind of comic I wanna do. Is it a one page/episode one chapter-comic? Is it more yonkoma-like in which normally chapters are devided by pages but every page is sort of a subchapter? Or do we make a strigent comic in which events and persons matter from the first page on?
The Reader
What kind of readers do we have? Hopefully we have the observant kind who will try to know the story from the first page on. Maybe we will have a binge-reader who looks by once every month. Maybe we have the kind of reader who reads every page but rather out of boredom ... maybe he even is interested but forgets the beginning while reading to the end.
The Solution?
Since you are writing a comic that has a story which is congruent from the beginning to the end you may have a problem the yonkoma or respectively the one page one chapter-author won't have. That much is clear, since it is the reason you are a bit of in a dilemma.
What I wanted to do for my own case is two things: Since I will have many characters I will make a chart which shows very rough character descriptions but also maybe an abstract.
We cannot force readers into things though it should be their responsibility to keep track (I know, I sound harsh. I don't mean it that harsh). But maybe with subtle things like connection charts could help?
What I notice on Marvel / DC-Comics or some manga as well is, that sometimes authors give the reader a quick footnote saying something like "see chapter2 page 12" or something.
Maybe I also am just writing to much and my ideas are a blow. ^^