DC continues to world-build and expand on its characters, trying Aquaman and Aqualad out in a full-length story in Showcase #30 (Nov 1960). Atlantis is really the third “character” in the story, with Aquaman’s full origin retold as flashback (including his mother, the exiled Atlanna, and his father Tom Curry).
Aquaman returns to Atlantis, responding to a plea for help against alien aquatic invaders. Aquaman, Aqualad and Topo the Octopus are able to oust the invaders and return the criminals to their own dimension. The sunken continent of Atlantis awards Aquaman the “Hero of Atlantis” medal, which is a nice way of telling the reader that Atlantis is going to play a much bigger role in Aquaman stories going forward. Good idea!
1960 definitely seems to be the year that DC has fully realized that interesting stories and avid readership can come from increasing the world-building of their characters, mostly fully demonstrated at this point across the Superman set of comics. Part of doing the research in this blog is for me to more fully understand the timeline of who influenced who in comic books. I always thought that increased world-building was an innovation that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby brought forth in the early-to-mid 1960s, but it was really DC that kicked this off well before Marvel Comics was re-birthed.