I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not comparing AG and QC. The relation I described above was just refulting Isyrion's suggestion that AG and QC started at a similar pace. They did not. There were several character hooks in QC by strip six.
Taking AG as it's own thing, I still find it wanting. Story is character. Character is story. Or more accurately, Plot = Character plus Conflict.
AG is nigh 40 strips in and we don't know much at all about the putative main characters, and have very little feel for why Vicissitude's conflict should matter to us. Not to mention it was just introduced.
I rather expect AG will do just fine, in the long run. Name recognition goes a long way, and there are plenty of other ways to drive new readers to strip (other artists). I'm not prognosticating, I'm not complaining. I'm offering a structural critique.
As a reader, offering no comparison to QC, I don't give a damn about AG's world or characters.
I've been somewhat over focused on the sympathy side. John Grisham knows you don't need sympathy to create an audience hook (I once tried to read everything he'd published, and found that I couldn't deal with any of it, because his characters were too unlikable to root for but not unlikable enough to root against. That said, Grisham was a best selling author and his book were being turned into movies in job lots. So he was doing something right). And, to be fair, AG started off raising decent hooks on the mechanical side.
The issue is what I call The X-Files problem. If you raise interesting questions that are not fundamentally unanswerable, the audience expects answers. In AG's case, the question raised for the starting block is "what is Alice?"
Now, the right thing to do is to string the audience along. Rather than giving them the answers, give them more questions. I call this The X-Files problem, because the was a certain point in the shows run where it became obvious that the writers were never going to answer any of the questions. Like, they didn't have answers. Right around the point, the show's rating declined.
The X-Files went for years, AG has had months. But I don't think I'm premature. X-Files got away with what they did by offering answers to the questions regularly. It just turned out every answer was another set of questions. AG has raised questions but barely touched on them.
I look at it this way: What if this was a comicbook? Given that one of Jeph's pages is about half a comic page, it turns out that the end of Chapter one lines up nicely with where a 22-24 page comic would end.
Would you buy issue two?
I don't know that I would. I don't know I wouldn't, but I do know that if I did, it would because of the author, not the story.