Perhaps the disconnect between the categories of “comics” and “graphic novels” arises from our unwillingness, as readers, to assign a book we love deeply to a category we may find shallow.
The term “graphic novel” may have been a useful euphemism 30 years ago (it didn’t hurt when if was applied to MAUS, first published in book form in 1986), but we may have reached a point where it confuses rather than clarifies.