I am like this with Megatokyo. Doesn't help that the author updates extremely slowly.
I can name those people (not counting hundreds or thousands of lurkers) on about two hands. Myself, Brion (of course! ^_^ ), SAGG, sunphoenix, SirBananaPie, UmberIsSexy, and ... that's mostly it. Obviously, there are quite a few more but some of them won't navigate to the forum. I think a very large part of this is once you get to the forum, there is no real Back To The Comic button, so the average user is wary of going there unless shortcutted. Also, it breaks the immersion when you have to stop reading the comment to discuss.
The question is, do you want to hire out someone like Disqus, or internalize it to the comic design? It looks like you have some talent for web design, so either is fine.