Wordy? Oh, I don't know. Take a look, at Robb's scanlations of Dutch beeldromans, or the original Dutch versions. You want wordy? There you go. As Panther says, depends on a number of things. Some comics and strips are perfect examples of the balance of words and pictures. There's an article I read recently which takes apart the huge number of British strips which combined word balloons with below( occasionally above) the illustration text boxes.
I'll try tofind it.
One of the major factors influencing the wordiness of comic strip or comic book panels is the size of the pages in the case of The Dutch Beeldromansen, size and language are the major factors. Size is the major factor because Beeldromansen were about 3/4 the size of the small, 1940s cigarette pacquets, so even average amount of wording would take up too much of the panel size to allow enough room for the artist to portray the scene's action. That is why the Beeldromansen genrally used the entire page as a single panel, so there would be enough space to show enough artwork to convey a decent amount of action. The other major factor, the way the language is expressed in words based on grammar rules, also affects it in the panel-crowding direction, as Dutch, compared to English, is generally 120-125% higher in number of alphabet letters (characters) used to convey similar concepts. Imagine having as much as 35% to 50% less room with which to draw necessary action scenes, using the ultra-wordy Hochdeutsch (Standard German)?
A third major factor is the style of the story-telling style of the author, and how much the want to convey through the strip's artwork, vs. hoiw much they value being a wordsmith. That balance also depends upon whether or not the artist and writer are the same person. A writer/artist may want to express more through the art's action and/or facial expressions, where a wordsmith may want the subtleties in his/her choice of words to carry more weight than the art. Or, you may get a wordsmith, like Charles Schultz, who used a lot of pantomime in his art, as well as very strong and expressive body language and facial expressions to convey attitude and motivation for actions, and not used a lot of wording, but also made his words count more.
I don't have enough knowledge of East or South Asian comic strips to know what style of word importance is most common. I have a few different Chinese comic books from a Chinese/Indonesian friend of mine, which are fairly sparing in wordiness (economical, using less text) than the average British or US comic books I've seen. But perhaps the amount of wordiness in comic books and strips in ANY language or nationality (country) of publication can vary with the type of publication based on historical publication traditional styles?
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