They call him “The Karate Kid.” Soft-spoken comics veteran Ralph Macchio shares a name with the lead actor of the 1980s martial arts classic, but he's never seen the movie, although he still receives fan mail asking whether he's the star.

“Depending on my mood, I'll either say yes or no,” Macchio says, laughing.

Unlike his namesake, Macchio is no one-hit wonder, with an impressive editing résumé that spans more than three decades and nearly every mainstream Marvel comic book on the shelves, including prominent titles like Spider-Man, Frank Miller's Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, and the entire Ultimate line of Marvel books.

Macchio's career in comics began with an origin story straight out of every comic book fan's wildest fantasy. On his way out of a New York comics convention in the mid-1970s, Macchio overheard a discussion about his favorite comic book, Killraven.

The speaker was Don McGregor, Killraven's writer. Macchio introduced himself, and McGregor remembered getting many letters from him about the series. “He invited me up for a tour of the Marvel offices. Right out of the blue.”

Macchio met legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont and bagged an interview with Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas. It was an opportunity that Macchio would parlay into a lifelong career. Hired as an assistant editor on a line of black-and-white magazines that included Doc Savage and Planet of the Apes, he rose through the ranks to his current position as executive editor.

Most of Macchio's work has been in the superhero genre, but he emphasizes that “we have—and have always had—war comics, western comics, romance comics, supernatural comics.”

His current project, adapting bestselling novelist Stephen King's Dark Tower novels into a comic book series, touches all those genres. Released as a periodical series earlier this year, Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born will be released as a hardcover collection on November 7. A longtime King fan himself, Macchio says that when he heard that Marvel was in negotiations to do the Dark Tower books, “I jumped up and down and said, 'Me! Pick me—please!' And I'm happy to report they did.”

At his first meeting with King at the Marvel offices, Macchio says the superstar horror author “never once gave us the sense that he was in charge because he was this huge literary phenomenon. He was funny and charming, and everyone was put immediately at ease.”

Rather than making the comic series into a straight adaptation of the prose works, Macchio and King decided to explore the early days of the protagonist, the gunslinger Roland Deschain, and how he became the gunslinger of the Dark Tower novels. Once they approached the comic as a prequel, Macchio says that King very quickly got to the heart of the project and “crystallized it with one phrase: 'A boy's test becomes a man's quest.' That was just brilliant, and it's been our guidepost from the start.”

Macchio calls the effort among King, himself, and the Dark Tower creative team “a unique situation, certainly.” Although King lays down the overall direction for the comics, Robin Furth, King's longtime assistant, breaks the stories down into specific plots, while novelist and comics writer Peter David does the actual scripting, and finally the Eisner Award—winning artist Jae Lee brings the stories visually to life on the page.

Tackling King's magnum opus, Macchio says, has left him feeling fearless. “No matter how intimidating the subject matter. If you're working with the best people available—and I am—they'll make you look good.”

And Dark Tower is looking very good indeed for Marvel. Launched in early 2007, the initial periodical miniseries, The Gunslinger Born, has sold more than 100,000 copies per issue, and Marvel expects it to be one of its largest book releases ever. Macchio says the series has brought an audience into comic shops that would normally never go into one—and brought them in droves.

He's betting those readers will venture back for the second Dark Tower periodical miniseries, The Long Road Home, launching in February 2008.

For Macchio, it will mark a return to one of the most satisfying collaborations of his career. “I'm enjoying what I'm editing now as much as anything I've ever worked on,” he says. “It's been an incredible journey from that first meeting with Stephen, and we're just warming up.”