CP1 Letter to Santa, page 9

One of Barks' trademarks was his repeated use of Interior Splash Panels (defined as a large panel replacing 4 normal ones, i.e. a half-page, inside a story). This was indeed a novelty at the time, and the readers were surprised in a positive way. Today we can still rejoice in the fact that Barks took such an interest in his stories that he drew elaborate panels that were often very time-consuming and hard to compose.
One sad example, though, is the half-page Barks made for U$34 Mythic Mystery which no reader has ever seen! The whole story was manhandled by the editor in order to make room for an advertisement, and Barks' art suffered: My chin hit my knees when I saw the big half-page stupender I did of Thor and Vulcan and a nephew riding above the busiest street corner in Duckburg in the gold chariot missing! Thor's horses terrified, thousands (at least) of people gaping upward in disbelief. Autos bumper to bumper, smoking, clanking. In short, I gave Vulcan something to be scared about. All wasted effort! - The art has since been lost...

In this page example Barks placed the splash panel on the top half of the page, and he made sure that the bottom panels 'suffered' from the heavy machinery panel by bending the vertical panel separations to indicate the massive weight of the steam shovels. Furthermore, he showed no less than three sceneries of turmoil to further strengthen the crucial destruction episode.

More Barks comments:

The big splash panel naturally was at the height of some situation - maybe not the climax of the whole story, but of the build-up of sequences, like where the two steam shovels meet. I thought it was worthwhile to put that in a big panel where I could show all that machinery slashing at each other. You try to crowd that into too small a panel, and you lose too much detail.

The splash panel was planned for well in advance. I just saved up all these different things so that I had room to draw them finally in one big, dramatic situation. I guess I liked to draw them; otherwise I wouldn't have put so many of them in, because it would take me two or three days to draw one of them.

The only real problem with splash panels was that they were so easy to cut out down at the office if they needed to run an ad for air rifles or chewing gum.