Ignite Visibility President John Lincoln, who contributes to Search Engine Land on occasion, created a comic about Matt Cutts and his leave from Google. I hate to spoil it, but on the other hand, I don’t really care. It turns out that John Mueller has really been Matt Cutts all along.

Last July, Cutts announced he was taking leave from Google. It was originally supposed to last at least through October. At the time, he wrote on his personal blog:

I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

At the end of October, Cutts revealed in a tweet that he was extending his leave into 2015:

In November, Cutts made some comments on a web chat show indicating that he might be interested in doing different work at Google when he decides to go back to work.

While Cutts has been away, the webmaster community has mostly heard from Mueller, at least when it comes to addressing Google webmasters issues in videos, which Cutts used to do on a regular basis. Here’s the comic:

Where is Matt Cutts? – SEO Comic Book – An infographic by the team at Where is Matt Cutts? – SEO Comic Book

In reality, Google said last month that it has someone new in the Matt Cutts position of head of web spam, but that this person won’t be “the all-around spokesperson” that Cutts was, so they’re not naming who it is.

Over on Search Engine Roundtable, Schwartz is telling people to stop harassing Mueller because it’s getting “disgusting”. Apparently a lot of people are being pretty nasty to him. I guess he did get to take Matt’s place in that department.