I use my iPod for lots of different things. Until now, reading comics was not one of them.

Despite the fact that I write on the Internet for a living, I've always been an old-media guy. I like the tactile sense of the pages in my hands. I like the physical presence of a stack of trade paperbacks on my bookshelf. And no experience can replace the feeling of walking into a comics shop and leaving with those slender volumes tucked under my arm.

But Imaginary Range, Square Enix's new interactive comic, makes the most of its digital medium by combining its presentation with bite-sized minigames...and a story that provides a strange commentary on our handheld-driven consumer culture.

Taken by themselves, each of Imaginary Range's two sections would seem rather dull. The story follows Cid and Ciela, two digital wanderers who use a handheld device (creatively named a "PAD") to alter seemingly virtual worlds as they see fit. It's Inception meets The Matrix, by way of Final Fantasy. And while it's not terribly original, it kept me interested.

The minigames, on the other hand, are pretty bland pastiches of Flight Control, Space Invaders, Arkanoid, and Where's Waldo. But when you add them to the context of the story, they suddenly make sense. It's just enough to make the "interactive" part of this interactive comic worthwhile.

It's clear that this is just the first issue of Imaginary Range, with others forthcoming. So the story's light on detail (and logic, for that matter). But the hints that are there are tantalizing. You're left to question the nature of the PADs the protagonists carry, the aims of their adversaries, and which side the good guys are on.

Buried beneath that uncertainty is an interesting parallel to our own iDevice usage. As Cid and Ciela seem to create their "miracles" at the expense of the worlds around them, do we consume our media just as voraciously through our handhelds? And is that always a good thing? I'm curious to see where this meta-commentary goes.

At the least, Imaginary Range makes an effort to explore the medium of comics in a different way, and at the low cost of free on the iTunes Store (and coming soon to Android), it's definitely worth trying.