Separating blog content into separate and navigable “Issues”

I’m about to design a WP blog for a friend of mine who is starting an academic journal, and had the ambitious idea that I could design it in a way such that all of the articles posted to the blog, in addition to being split up by category, could also be split up by which issue they were published in. The front page would display normally, showing featured posts and latest posts and widgets etc, but it would only display articles that were in the most recent “issue”. Also, the front page could be paginated by issue so that there is a “previous issue” button and “next issue” button that would bring up the same page format but feed a different set of articles (from a different issue) through it.

Something similar to what I mean can be found on this website:
http://informationarchitects.jp/

If anyone could give me any advice on how to split up the blog content in that way I’d really appreciate it. I wanted to see if anyone already knew how to do this before I went through the lengthy research and trial and error process.

• Is there a special plugin that’s capable of doing that sort of thing? Or that would be able to with minimum modification?
• Are there any free or cheap themes that have this built in that I can download and mod?
• Is there a way in particular that I should go about rewriting the code that would achieve the effect I’m looking for? And how should the posts be organized? Should both the topic and the issue be marked by categories, or should the topic (ie. poetry, prose, etc) be marked by category and the issue be organized some other way, like with custom fields?

Thanks for your help.