workflow for a periodical?

i'm building a magazine website. the magazine launches quarterly. i've set up the "story" content type to be a child of the "issue" custom content type. i'd like to author all the articles for an issue in a restricted mode (viewable to editors but not publically), create the landing pages associated with that issue, then at launch time set the parent issue to "live" and have all its child objects automatically go live at the same time.

which strikes me as something that clever use of workflow might be able to do.

has anyone else worked on a similar task, who can point me in the right direction?

thanks in advance :-)