The Body Appearance settings in the Comments section of the Customizer apply to the portion of the commenting area where actual comments are displayed, as shown here:
The settings provided give you control of the:
Comments Body Background
Here you can set a specific background color or image for the comment body area specifically.
Comment Font Styles
The Font Styles you set here, relate to the following items in the comment body area:
Comment Author Link Options
With these options you can choose whether the comment author name will appear inline with the comment itself, or on a separate line. (If separate, you can set the spacing between author and comment.)
Now the default behavior of the author name is that it acts as a link to whatever website the author input when they submitted their comment. In this options area, you can set that link to open the author’s website in the same window, or a new window.
Comment Time Display
Comment time display consists of the date and time a comment was made. Here you can choose to show or hide. And if shown, choose right or left alignment, which is in relation to the comment itself. Here is an example of left alignment.
Individual Comment Spacing
The options provided here giving you top/bottom/left/right padding control of individual comments, as well as vertical spacing between separate comments.
Individual Comment Appearance
Here you can set a background color for individual comments, as well as set a border line to separate individual comments. (If the line separator width is set to 0px, then no separator line for individual comments will be displayed.)
Threaded Comment Appearance
Threaded comments are are those where someone has replied directly to another person’s comment. To help differentiate an original comment from a reply comment, here you can set a pixel padding value to threaded comments. Here is an example:
Alternate Comment Styling
One way you can contrast comments within the comment body area is to provide alternate comment styling, so that every other comment receives different styling than the general options already provided. The alternate comment styling options include overriding the background color and font colors (comment body, comment author and links) for alternating comments.
For example, using the settings above, you would get the following result:
Notice how that second comment appears differently than the others?
Alternate Styling for Comments by Post Author
Similarly, if you want to give your visitors a visual cue to comments made by yourself (the author) on the site, you can do that with the settings in this area.
The settings above would result in the following display on our site:
As you can see, comments made by the post author (“admin”) are styled differently than the others.
Comment Awaiting Moderation Text/Style
Assuming you have comment moderation enabled in your WordPress settings under “Settings > Discussion”, here, you can change the comment moderation message and it’s styling if you’d like.
The above settings would result in: