How to analyse the complexity of a problem with two or more size measures
There's nothing wrong with your approach. You have a two-variable function with a known (almost, up to a multiplicative constant) upper bound. In that case, it's perfectly acceptable to take a "slice" through the function by holding one of the variables fixed and ask how the resulting one-variable function behaves. One does this sort of thing often, when, for example, we take the derivative of $f(x, y)$ with respect to $x$.