For those in the know, ZEAL is a wonderful blog all about video games, comic books, and pop culture.
They publish quirky writing about old school video games, such as Leisure Suite Larry, as well as cultural criticism about pop culture, often from a feminist perspective.
The accept pitches directly from freelance writers. In fact, one of our contributors at Freedom With Writing (Rachel Presser), is contributor to their site.
According to their submission guidelines:
All pitches should describe the full scope of what you’d like to do (especially if it’s beyond what we usually do — but we absolutely love stuff like that so we encourage you to pitch it!) and why it would be interesting to readers and a good fit for ZEAL. If you’ve done some writing before, we’d love to see a link to it, too! Pitches should be no more than a paragraph in length, and let us know what is new and original about your topic, what your angle is, and what’s interesting and exciting about it!
We like to hear about comics and games that are rarely discussed, but we’d also like to hear you discuss them in ways that are fresh and new too. ZEAL’s had highly analytical features on Sonic Adventure’s broken geometry and level design, and lyric essays on Tove Jansson’s Moomin comics combining biography, personal reminiscence, and the author’s own drawings.
Keep in mind that they get a lot of submissions, so publication is highly competitive.
They pay $100 to $200.
To learn more, read their submission guidelines.