Mera, sidekick/wife to title character Aquaman, had been battling at his side for about six years before this scene in AQUAMAN #46 (1969), written by Steve Skeates, drawn by Jim Aparo, and edited with an aim toward "realistic adventure" by Dick Giordano (who also spearheaded similar orientations in WONDER WOMAN and the SUPERMAN books).
However, for most of her history, Mera's method of combat was entirely confined to whipping up various weapons of "hard water," conjured from whatever ordinary water happened to be about. This rather Green Lantern-ish talent wasn't without its charms, but it did seem to drop Mera into the category of "defenseless damsel" whenever there was no water around.
Thanks to the Giordano editorship, Mera was able to upgrade to basic asskicking status, and from then on, whenever the subject of her fighting-skills came up, she was shown as being a better than average scrapper. Thus the above sequence, which would be an unremarkable fight-scene for Batgirl, has some historical importance for the DC character. Add to that formidability DC's later decision to assert that all Atlanteans had something like super-strength due to swimming around all the time, and Mera pretty much left her early Silver-Age conception eating dust-- or water, as the case might be.
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