In Devlin's senior year he met Dorothy Wende, a junior from Buffalo, New York majoring in Fine Arts.
After the beginning of World War II, he began his active duty in the U.S. Navy as an ensign, where he was assigned to the Identification and Characteristics Office of Naval Intelligence.
Rising to the rank of lieutenant at the end of World War II, Devlin returned to a private life and began a ten-year association with Collier's Weekly.
It was during the 1950s, a period of political uncertainty and the concurrent decline of illustration that Devlin developed a comic strip carried in local papers, the Newark Evening News and the Elizabeth Daily Journal, and syndicated in newspapers as far west as Honolulu.
[5] Afterwards Devlin proceeded to renew a long-standing interest in Victorian architecture where he published To Grandfather's House We Go (1967), containing illustrations after paintings he had begun as early as 1954.
Devlin's style results from a technique very similar to contemporary photo-realism as is evident in ‘’Off the Yellow Brick Road’’ (1989).
He alters slide images to define his basic composition, but incorporates "high truths" in the form of the removal of offending modern incursions such as telephone poles to infuse a sense of nostalgia and mood.