List the first posts for the different subcategories a taxonomy?

I’m using a custom content type, “comics”, with a custom taxonomy, “stories”. Each story consists of several consecutive pages. I’d like to have a comics archive page that lists each story (with a thumbnail) and links to the first page of that story.

I’m not sure how to go about this. At one point I was using list categories, but the issue with that is that 1) it links to the category page, not the first page of the story (which is only mildly solved by setting the post number to 1), and 2) thus was not easy to add a thumbnail to.

I’d like to just list the first posts for the different subcategories in that taxonomy. Any ideas? I’d be every so happy!