Your version is quite nice. Great design. Looks like you have the added benefit of pre-knowing your comic dimensions.

You're afflicted with the non-functioning-hashes-in-history problem though. This fixed it for me: http://github.com/tkyk/jquery-history-plugin

Though, it does get annoying ending up with 100 non-pages in your history. Maybe a big "navigate by hashes: yes/no" option would help us out.