Back in my ecommerce consultancy days, I used to makeencourage my developers to read Scott McCloud's excellent Understanding Comics (and, later, Reinventing Comics), so that they could get their heads around the semiotics of stateless loosely-coupled user interfaces by understanding that in western comics the action happens between the panes - just like all the work happens in that gap between the screens of a web application...

Web 2.0 blows that analogy away, as we move to a more seamless, consistent web user experience with technologies like AJAX.

However I just had a revelation.

Japanese comics are like AJAX, in that everything happens in the pane as you read it...

So now I'll make my developers read Akira.

[expanding on a comment to karentraviss]