There were several instant constructive suggestions on my post. A few
minutes ago, I just upgraded from maxima 5.5 to wxmaxima 0.7.2 and was blown
away by the beautiful interface. Robert Dodier gave an elegant solution to
batching with comments. I took it one step further and like the results.
Assuming all the defaults in wxmaxima's styles, do Edit -> Configure ->
Style -> Strings (in the Styles pull down) -> blue (for color) -> uncheck
Italic -> OK. In the batch file use for each comment Robert's suggestion,
i.e. "q has at least one double zero on the unit circle."$ would be an
example. The resulting batched file has the comments in blue normal font
and expressions and calculations in black italic, which is even better than
what I was seeking. Thanks to Robert and the implementers of wxmaxima!