[yesenadam]

"Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. The term gained popularity in the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978) and the start of Marvel's Graphic Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986 and the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using "graphic novel" as a category in book stores in 2001."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel

I read A Contract with God and some other of Eisner's stuff lately, e.g. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the version of the "To be, or not to be" speech in Comics and Sequential Art - just awesome.