La Giraffa (The Giraffe) was an Italian weekly magazine which combined erotic imagery with humour, appearing in the early 1970s as part of the rapidly expanding market for adult erotic magazines. Published by Edimax, it ran from 1971 to 1973, and Fernando Carcupino became closely associated with it from 1972, producing a substantial series of covers and illustrations.

Carcupino was an appropriate choice for La Giraffa. He had already spent two decades moving effortlessly between fine-art painting, magazine illustration, humour and comics, and had considerable experience in depicting attractive women for popular publications. By the time he arrived at La Giraffa, he brought a  degree of draughtsmanship and painterly finish that distinguished his work from the more hurried offerings typical of much popular erotic publishing.

The illustrations showed how effectively his style could accommodate the magazine’s mixture of sensuality and comedy. His women are voluptuous, glamorous and often deliberately exaggerated, but they retain a sense of personality and theatricality. In the monochrome drawings, economical line and energetic cross-hatching give the figures a lively, almost cartoon-like immediacy, while the colour work is more painterly, using broad areas of warm colour, expressive brushwork and carefully modelled flesh.

The early 1970s was an interesting period in Italian popular culture. The country remained strongly influenced by Catholic morality and conservative attitudes towards sexuality, while the social changes of the 1960s were producing a rapidly expanding appetite for material that challenged those conventions. Adult comics had already emerged in the 1960s with titles such as Isabella, Jacula and Lucifera, and by the early 1970s erotic pocket publications had become a major presence on the newsstands. La Giraffa belonged to the lighter, erotic-humorous side of this phenomenon, alongside similar publications including Menelik and La Battuta.