This is a very interesting article on the "metaphorical Blackness" of Spiderman and other Spidey related thoughts. Believe it or not, it's from The London Review of Books.

LRB | Jonathan Lethem: The Amazing . . .

Spider-Man, as a dashiki-wearing instructor at a Brooklyn day-care centre once explained to me and a group of other (multi-hued) children, wasn't actually invented by white people at all, but derived from an African legend of a spider-demon of the jungle, a trickster figure. Everyone knew this, it was as basic as Elvis Presley's music having originated in black sources. I listened, that day, and believed. It may have been nonsense, or only coincidence, but the fact that it needed to be claimed is significant.