Before Comus was organized Carnival celebrations in New Orleans were mostly confined to the Catholic Creole community, parades were irregular and often very informal.

Building on the initial work of what French Creole American nobleman, and playboy, Bernard de Marigny had done in 1833, funding and organizing the first official Mardi Gras- a "parade" followed by a tableau ball celebration;[3][4][5] in December 1856, six Anglo-American men of New Orleans gathered at Dr. John Pope's Drug Store on the Corner of Jackson and Prytania, a favorite rendezvous for the young men of the Fourth District,[6] to begin to organize a secret society to observe Mardi Gras in a more formal and organized fashion than their Creole predecessors.

[7][8][9][10] These men invited their businessmen friends, a group of some thirty to forty people, to meet at a club room above the now-defunct Gem Restaurant/Saloon in New Orleans' Vieux Carré on Jan 4, 1857, to organize the Carnival society.

[11] Founding members: Samuel Manning Todd, a drygoods merchant from Utica, New York, who arrived in New Orleans by way of Mobile, Alabama, like a few others.

[12][13] Frank Shaw, Jr., commission merchant from New York State; Lloyd Dulany Addison (son of Walter Dulany Addison, of the Oxon Hill Manor Addisons, members of the Tidewater gentry) born in Kentucky,[14] partner Bullitt, Miller & Co. merchants and cotton factors; Dr. John H. Pope, credited with naming the group, from New York State originally,[15] and Joseph Ellison, owned Pope, Ellison & Co., commission merchants-Pope was also a pharmacist owning Pope's Drugstore at the corner of Jackson and Prytania where this small coterie initially organized, he was born in Louisville, Kentucky; brother William Ellison, partner of firm Starke & Ellison, Cotton Brokers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[15] The new group acquired the costumes, floats, flambeaux, and even theme — their very name, Comus — from the 1856 Cowbellion parade (Milton's "Paradise Lost").

One Mardi Gras historian describes The Mistick Krewe's creation in New Orleans thus: Comus' first night parade – replete with torches (which later came to be known as "flambeaux"), marching bands, and rolling floats – was wildly popular with Carnival revelers.

Opposition to Reconstruction-era reforms prompted parade themes such as 1873's "The Missing Links to Darwin's Origin of Species" and 1877's "The Aryan Race".

[20] From the first Comus parade until a police strike in 1979, nothing suspended New Orleans' lavish Mardi Gras celebrations except war.

Now, therefore, do I deeply sympathizing with the general anxiety, deem it proper to withhold your Annual Festival in this goodly Crescent City and by this proclamation do command no assemblage of the

In 1991 the New Orleans City Council, led by Democrat Dorothy Mae Taylor, passed an ordinance that required social organizations, including Mardi Gras Krewes, to certify publicly that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, in order to obtain parade permits and other public licensure.

The Mistick Krewe has jealously guarded the identities of its membership and the privacy of its activities (other than its parade), perhaps even more than the other Carnival organizations subscribing to the traditional code of secrecy.