Namora has the earliest appearance of the characters that would go on to be the Agents of Atlas, making her debut 15 months prior to Venus. A bunch of crooks - who own their own submarine, as crooks commonly did in the 1940s - attack the undersea kingdom - not called Atlantis, because it seems to be in the Pacific - Namor and Namora call home while Namor's off pursuing crooks in Asia. Everyone gets shot in what is essentially a jewel heist, but Namora's only grazed. So when Namor comes home, they team up, and catch up to the crooks when they try to rob a gambling boat.
Seems like you'd try that before throwing on scuba gear to attack an entire kingdom. Scale up, not down.
Namora gets saddled with the old chloroformed and taken hostage bit, but Namor sends her a message in a broadcast meant to make the crooks think there's a lot of jewels hidden in a particular place. The trap works, the crooks are caught, and Namor foists Namora off on his old friend Betty Dean. Which is what he did with Namorita about 30 years later. I guess when you're a grouchy dickhead like the Avenging Son, you only have so many people to ask for unreasonable favors.
As first appearances go, it's not a stunning debut. Namora gets a couple of hits in, but gets k.o.'ed twice and taken hostage. She does figure out the hidden meaning of Namora's message, and we're told she's strong enough to break the handcuffs if she gets some water splashed on her, but that happens off-panel, so it's not like she makes a dramatic escape and clocks some guy about to shoot Namor in the back. Her biggest contribution is that she heard one of the crooks referred to by name. Which we don't actually see in the comic, so when she said the name was 'Stoop', I thought she just didn't know English and one of the guys said "stop" for some reason.
Prior to Agents of Atlas, Namora spent 30+ years being dead, until M-11 decided that the poison probably didn't kill her, only put her in a coma or something. Quite how it figured that out, from thousands of miles away, I have no idea. Parker plays her up as a the team's (physical) powerhouse. When the team starts to fragment under surprise reveals, she brings down Bob's flying saucer with one hit. Gorilla Man clocks her in the face with a big metal pipe and it barely scratches her.
Leonard Kirk's preliminary sketches show he wanted her to have no pupils as a result of resurrection, but that seems to have been overruled. Probably because she was only mostly dead. Her ankle wings are more like the wings of a flying fish than a bird. She's got some of that same noble air as Namor, but it doesn't tip over into grating arrogance like it does with him. Maybe she's less insecure than Namor, doesn't need to make such a show of things, or maybe having lost so many decades, and having been largely forgotten, gave her some perspective. She understands the weight Jimmy Woo assumes, first as leader of this team, and later as the leader of the Atlas Organization, because she knows a little about ruling.
Outside of maybe Gorilla Man - people love talking primates! - Namora probably got the most use outside Agents of Atlas. She got drawn into the Incredible Hercules book, and she and Herc had some kind of a romantic thing going for a minute. Of course, then Parker started something up between her and Namor, and I'm going to have side with Gorilla Man who observed, 'guess they even got hillbillies under the sea.'
Unfortunately, Mark Millar killed off Namorita in Civil War right about the time Agents of Atlas came out - Parker says that was a total coincidence on the timing - and by the time Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning brought at least a version of Namorita back in Nova, Agents of Atlas had pretty much run out of chances to find a receptive marketplace. Neither character has gotten much use in the last 15 years, and I definitely don't recall any sort of mother-daughter reunion.
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