Front page trouble

I’m trying to create a site for simple one-panel cartoons. Actually I wanted to have the most recent one one the front page and allow people to click to older cartoons – but I would like to keep track of how many people saw which cartoon and add social media counters. I guess this is only possible if I keep every cartoon on its own page – as comic easel does. So what I want is this: I would like to have some sort of clickable preview on the home page which takes the reader to the most recent cartoon page from which they can navigate.

This leaves me with the possibility of placing a ‘comic-area’ only in single-comic.php and not on the front page. So I tried adding a comic-post-area to the front page instead. Unfortunately, the thumbnail looked bad (strangely cropped). Is there a way to change the appearance of the comic-post-area? Can I control the size of the thumbnail and get rid of the comic title?

A second workaround would be using a dynamic front page and using your [comic-archive] shortcode in the topmost post – but actually I just want the most recent cartoon to be visible there and not a list of all of them. Can I change that?
Or is there perhaps another shortcode I could use?

I’m a bit of a wordpress-noob, so maybe you could point me into the rigth direction. Thank you so much!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/comic-easel/